Effect of distance from server on page load speed

+1 to Chopper3, but I'd also like to explain something.

Geographic distance has less to do with transfer than you would think.

What does matter:

1. Your ISP's peering
2. Their ISP's peering
3. The route between those peers
4. traffic shaping

Example 1: At my university, we get our internet through a state owned ISP. This ISP has it's own network and peers in chicago. Therefore, in order to connect to a house down the road, the connection needs to go all the way to chicago. Thus, it's much faster to communicate with something in chicago than to connect to something down the road.

I guess you need to think about it like roads rather than as the crow flies. Just because something is closer doesn't mean that it's really closer by internet. It also doesn't mean it's faster. This is extremely exaggerated with the internet. For instance, if one single "free way" between dallas and NYC is being saturated, it could be faster to transfer from europe to dallas.

Those large companies have geographically-dispersed data centres, so you're being responded to by a site that's closer to you rather than one central site - that's all it is.