I find this to be the more fascinating part of Google's response time as well. Sending an optimized html file to a client in a matter of milliseconds is cool, b

I find this to be the more fascinating part of Google's response time as well. Sending an optimized html file to a client in a matter of milliseconds is cool, but static pages should all load very quickly, so I don't see much surprise here - they've just optimized their front-end and done a good job of it. Them being able to take your query, discover the data that answers your query, then optimize that data down to a little html snippet that fast is significantly more impressive to me.