I think you're mistaking a variety of factors, including DNS resolution, for network and server speed.
The ping response you posted shows that your connection to google is slower than your connection to your server. The reason the program ping reacts more quickly in displaying output to your terminal is because google is optimized for scale, particularly in terms of networking and DNS resolution, and ping has to perform a DNS lookup before running unless you give it an IP address. To quote from Wikipedia's article on the Google platform:
Details of the Google world wide private networks are not publicly
available but Google publications make references to the "Atlas
Top 10" report that ranks Google as the third largest ISP behind Level
3.
In order to run such a large network with direct connections to as
many ISP as possible at the lowest possible cost Google has a very
open peering policy.
From this site we can see that the Google network can be accessed from
67 public exchange points and 69 different locations across the world.
As of May 2012 Google had 882 Gbit/s of public connectivity (not
counting private peering agreements that Google has with the largest
ISPs). This public network is used to distribute content to Google
users as well as to crawl the Internet to build its search indexes.
The private side of the network is a secret but recent disclosure from
Google indicate that they use custom built high-radix switch-routers
(with a capacity of 128 × 10 Gigabit Ethernet port) for the wide area
network. Running no less than two routers per datacenter (for
redundancy) we can conclude that the Google network scales in the
terabit per second range (with two fully loaded routers the
bi-sectional bandwidth amount to 1,280 Gbit/s). These custom
switch-routers are connected to DWDM devices to interconnect data
centers and point of presences (PoP) via dark fibre.
From a datacenter view, the network starts at the rack level, where
19-inch racks are custom-made and contain 40 to 80 servers (20 to 40
1U servers on either side, while new servers are 2U rackmount systems.
Each rack has a switch). Servers are connected via a 1 Gbit/s Ethernet
link to the top of rack switch (TOR). TOR switches are then connected
to a gigabit cluster switch using multiple gigabit or ten gigabit
uplinks. The cluster switches themselves are interconnected and form
the datacenter interconnect fabric (most likely using a dragonfly
design rather than a classic butterfly or flattened butterfly layout).
From an operation standpoint, when a client computer attempts to
connect to Google, several DNS servers resolve www.google.com into
multiple IP addresses via Round Robin policy. Furthermore, this acts
as the first level of load balancing and directs the client to
different Google clusters. A Google cluster has thousands of servers
and once the client has connected to the server additional load
balancing is done to send the queries to the least loaded web server.
This makes Google one of the largest and most complex content delivery
networks.
Google has numerous data centers scattered around the world. At least
12 significant Google data center installations are located in the
United States. The largest known centers are located in The Dalles,
Oregon; Atlanta, Georgia; Reston, Virginia; Lenoir, North Carolina;
and Moncks Corner, South Carolina. In Europe, the largest known
centers are in Eemshaven and Groningen in the Netherlands and Mons,
Belgium. Google's Oceania Data Center is claimed to be located in
Sydney, Australia.
It has nothing to do with the quality of the server hardware. From the same article:
Google uses commodity-class x86 server computers running customized
versions of Linux. The goal is to purchase CPU generations that offer
the best performance per dollar, not absolute performance. How this is
measured is unclear, but it is likely to incorporate running costs of
the entire server, and CPU power consumption could be a significant
factor.
Which may be more than you wanted to know, but there you are.
