Ilya Grigorik, a Google Developer Advocate, specifically working on making the web faster, announced quietly on Google+ that they just launched a new feature that will make mobile search faster by 200-400 milliseconds.
With the new ping attribute, you can speed up requests and response times to your site from Google mobile search. Ilya explains that when a "user clicks on a result, typically they are first sent to a Google URL redirector and then to the target site." But "with <a ping>, the click is tracked using an asynchronous call, meaning that the user sees one less redirect and a faster overall experience," he explained.
We know speed is important, especially on mobile search, so this is nice to see.
A note, this is only currently supported on Chrome and Safari.
Forum discussion at Google+.
