Optimizing a query

[Ryan Smith]

Hello MySQL forum.

I'm pretty good when it comes to simple database functionality, but I don't even know where to begin with optimizing queries that run slow.

I have a table that looks like:
+------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| counter_id | int(11) | | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
| referer | text | YES | | NULL | |
| ip | text | YES | | NULL | |
| agent | text | YES | | NULL | |
| time | datetime | YES | | NULL | |
| page | text | YES | | NULL | |
+------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

The query that I need to run against it looks like:

select count(distinct(page)) as hits, page FROM counter GROUP BY page ORDER BY hits

This is running extremely slow with about 60000+ records. What is the best way to start optimizing this?

Thanks.