As you probably know by now, Google considers page speed as one of its many signals for search engine rankings. With that in mind, you may also be interested in knowing that in Chrome 6, developers can access web timing metrics for measuring web page load time across browsers.

About.com has partnered with Google’s Make the Web Faster team to make About.com faster. This is relatively significant to the web, given that About.com results often rank very high in search results.

YouTube has just launched a "Speed Dashboard", which makes speed information about videos available to users. YouTube’s Chris Dale tells us it "offers granular insight into what your YouTube video speed looks like."

"We think it’s pretty cool and all part of our goal to make the web a faster place," he adds.

Late last year, in a conversation about the Caffeine update, Google’s Matt Cutts told WebProNews that page speed could become a factor Google looks at for ranking search results. His comments received a lot of attention, because Google has never taken this into consideration for ranking websites in the past.

About a month ago, WebProNews interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts, who suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world’s most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why Cutts’ suggestion could soon become a reality.

Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google?

Google has launched a new extension for its Chrome browser, which lets developers identify performance problems with their web apps. This may be an increasingly important issue if Google starts counting speed as a ranking factor in search results.

Google has a post up talking about how the company uses data it collects from Google Toolbar users, specifically in relation to its enhanced features. These features are opt-in.