Site speed factor for SEO

Google announced that from now on ,
the speed of the site will be an important factor in the page ranking .

So if you want your sites to get up in the web searches in Google , you better
make them load fast.

Though some things are not that clear to me .
For example :

1.If I have a light page (well.. like google search page ) - it will sure load faster than a page loaded with info - like some article . Will the algorithm will take this into account ?

2. My server is located in Israel , and the search is done from US for example .

Sure it will load a little bit slower. How Google will treat this ?

Read all about it here - Using site speed in web search ranking