There's a big difference between "done loading" and "appears to be done loading". Google is reportedly very cautious about the latter, and pulls some hijinks to appear faster than it is. Frankly, I'd be happier if more sites paid a similar level of attention.
That said, if your search page takes over a second, you're right, it might be an issue with your network.
Years ago I worked with a developer who had a different methodology: 2x, then bump the unit of measure. Thus, 1 day -> 2 weeks; 2 weeks -> 4 months. It's been remarkably accurate over the past couple of decades.
Does this break links and lead to link rot? Other StackExchange sites don't seem to have the page rank of StackOverflow. It also makes it harder to restrict searches to a particular site when questions are spread across multiple sites inconsistently depending on what year they were asked.
I have a question I want to ask, but haven't. This is mostly because I feel that asking it properly, describing what I've tried, linking to (not) duplicates and explaining why they're not relevant, and linking to the docs to try and explain why I don't understand them, etc., etc, is a great deal of work. In other words, explain why the top 20 Google and SO results and workarounds aren't relevant to the answer I'm looking for. Doing it "properly" would take about 30 minutes. ... and thus I haven't asked.
I went with a workaround that I'm unsatisfied with because it was easier than asking a good question.
My biggest complain about SO is that with the expansion into other fields that questions that used to be welcome on SO (or get more visibility because of being on SO) are being shunted to SuperUser or ServerFault or other sites under the StackExchange umbrella. [1] I think the drive to keep SO purely about "programming" runs into issues similar to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy [2]. As a developer, sometimes I need answers about Amazon Web Services, Azure, Docker, or the Linux command line, as a consequence of programming, but those sorts of questions are, more modernly, marked off-topic for SO.
I send unauthenticated email on port 25, every semester, in front of my students, as part of a discussion on internet application protocols. I can't use "God", because the addresses are validated, but I do send "from" the school's IT director. I even give them the commands to do it themselves (along with a strict talking to about how it's not truly anonymous because their network access is authenticated).
I've been able to do it at every university I've studied or worked at.
That said, if your search page takes over a second, you're right, it might be an issue with your network.