If your code needs to wait for something, it's better done with some sort of event system or interrupt or similar; the reason being that a 5s wait is a 5s wait, but if, say the thing you're waiting for returned in 10ms, if you're using an alternative solution you can carry on immediately, not wait the remaining 4.99 seconds. Conversely, if it takes longer than 5s, who knows what happens?

But then I think of some alternative method where they send an ajax request to "sleep.google.com/?t=5" and get a response like "" after five seconds.