Service Workers are in-browser proxy that gives the power to script what happened before going to the network, and what happens from the network, to ensure websites are responsive and always available, as it speeds up delivery of Web content by reducing the amount of back-and-forth communication between a browser and a server.
Google has now employed these agents in speeding up search queries, and using the Service Workers the company was able to cache repeated searches, and load results twice as fast.
While Google had always been working on improving the speed of search, it didn’t come as a surprise that it now looks to Service Workers, as the company was a party in the draft specifying how Service Workers should be implemented in browsers, which was co-edited by Google's Engineer Alex Russell and Jungkee Song of Samsung Electronics.
The recorded search boost is certainly a huge leap, albeit the Service Workers were only implemented in Chrome for Android, version 62 and up, which therefore, makes only Chrome for Android users the ones that gain from the new speed performance.
Google, however has promised to expand the repeated search improvement to other browsers if the vendors add support for Navigation Preload, a latency optimization that's critical for Google Search to run Service Workers.
If you wish to experience the new speed, you'll need to be running Chrome version 62 or above on Android, while Mozilla is also planning to implement Service Workers for Firefox.
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