A new feature has been added to the google webmaster tools. Site Performance is a tool which shows you how fast google retrieves pages from your site, and example graph from on of my monitored shows this:

This really useful tool allows you to tweak your website so that it stays in the Fast region of the chart.

Apart from the obvious benefits of better user experience, google has indicated that they may be using site speed as one of ranking criteria in future algorithms. As you can see above, the site in question has reasonable good speed, but not all sites will consistently fall below the red dotted line, and this may be a problem for web design agencies that use sloppy and bloated code. The moral of the story is, keep it clean, keep it keen, and you will be seen (hey that rhymes!)

There is also a new page speed browser addon for you to check the loading times for your webpages. This is available as a download on the site performance page in webmaster tools