Google has set out on yet another venture, and this time it’s to make our web experience faster, by 23% in fact. SPYD (pronounced Speedy) aims to augment the HTTP protocol in order to help speed up the loading of webpages. Google’s ultimate goal is to speed up the browsing experience by as much as 50%. As stated, SPDY isn’t a replacement for HTTP; instead, it simply enhances it by overriding connection management and data transfer formats, among other things, while still utilizing HTTP methods and headers.

Reducing web page load times by 50% isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do when working with established standards. However, Google has laid out several technical goals that modify or enhance current protocols to aid in this ultimate end goal of reducing latency.

One of them is to allow many concurrent HTTP requests to run across a single TCP session. Reducing the amount of TCP sessions required means there will be less load on web servers, which will mean a better and faster web experience for all.

Another is that the SPDY protocol compresses headers and eliminates unnecessary ones. This header compression resulted in an 88% reduction in the size of header requests and an 85% reduction in the size of response headers. Some of the most dramatic results from header compression were seen in those with upload connection speeds of 375Kbps, which is a very common upload speed for DSL and many cable connections.

As the results to the right, published by Google, show, there is significant speed up for not only a standard DSL connection, but there is an even more significant speedup for the speedier cable connection with nearly three times the upload bandwidth. A lot of this has to do with the SPDY protocol allowing many HTTP requests on a single TCP session, which allows for full parallelization on all downloads. It is similar to those old download managers that would open multiple sessions when downloading a large file in order to get greater speed, except that it is doing it for webpages instead.

Even with all of that, Google’s not done yet. They plan to optimize for 3G/4G networks, which are quickly becoming a place where a lot of people do a good amount of web browsing, and they are also wanting to make SSL part of the underlying transport protocol in order to make it more ubiquitous.

So what do you need to do to take advantage of this new SPDY protocol? The good news is that if you’re using Firefox 11+ or Google Chrome, you don’t need to do anything extra as it is already built in and fully supported on those browsers. The bad news is that there are currently not many web servers utilizing the SPDY protocol. Some Google services use it as well as their ads, and just recently, Twitter enabled SPDY on its servers. In addition, Google recently started providing SPDY packages for Apache, which will allow many small websites to start using SPDY. Hopefully this will lead to a faster and better web experience for all.