Google - polling like it's the 90s

A technical review of Google's live score feature in search results reveals surprising use of old-school tech from the 90s, contrary to Google's reputation for efficient micro-optimization and pioneering initiatives like AMP. The reviewer found that Google uses HTTP polling instead of more suitable protocols such as Websockets or Server-Sent Events (SSE), resulting in an 80x increase in overhead compared to a raw Websocket solution. This approach also leads to high variable latencies and diminished user experience, with average latency for score updates being 25 times slower than any streaming transport that could have been used. Furthermore, Google's scoring synchronization is inefficient, sending the entire state object every 10 seconds instead of only the changes. The reviewer suggests using Xdelta as a delta encoding algorithm to improve efficiency and reduce bandwidth consumption.