Google web accelerator

http://webaccelerator.google.com/

Creepy. Using it now. It does seem to speed things up, amazingly enough. Dunno if it’s the placebo effect, or what… Of course the side effect is that everything goes through google.

Time for the Googopticon?

http://users.rcn.com/mackey/thesis/panopticon.html

Edit: cleanup and more thoughts.

A lot of the speedup seems to be coming from the fact that everything goes through google’s servers. They usually have better pingtime than most other places on the net. It also seems to cache things a bit more intelligently. And it grabs pages that are linked to the current page.

I’ll probably uninstall it after awhile. I can tell, but in about 15 minutes worth of surfing, I’ve saved 45 seconds by their estimate. Telling google my entire history, as well as everything transmitted by http really isn’t worth it.

The Google conspiracy theorists, who have the Google-Watch guy as their patron saint, are already compaining about how this is a bit of spyware designed to rob innocent website owners of ad revenue and mine all outgoing web requests for sensitive data.

In reality, it’s pretty much another accelleration through web proxy with some specific tweaks, but not all that different from what many ISPs provide to their users already.

If it is pre-fetching pages, get ready for it to stop working on most sites. I know I will ban it like did the other bullshit that pre-fetched pages.

Chet

I’ve heard some reports of private pages from password protected servers being cached by one user’s visit and then being sent to another user going to the same site, but with the usual hysteria that surrounds any Google software like desktop search or toolbar autolinks, I have no idea how real the complaints are.

Whoa! It just happened to me. Went to metafilter, and it showed me logged on as someone. Wasn’t able to do anything though.

Reading through threads on the issue at other forums leads me to believe that it’s a very real issue.

Personally, I’d steer clear of it for the time being.

Of course, the minute or two of download time you’ll save every day through any “web accelerator” isn’t really worth adding another potential complication in your network setup, in my opinion.

Looks like it adds a header (X-Moz: prefetch) to prefetch requests, which you can then ignore.

Down with the Google Hegemony! (Except when Billy G. gets upset. Love that.)

I, for one, welcome our new Googlezon masters!

Thanks andrew.

Prefetching puts a huge extra strain on a server, with little or no benefit seen by the user. It can pull 30 extra pages, when the average visitor only goes to 1.

I poked around with it for a bit – I don’t think it’s just automatically prefetching everything, perhaps only links you mouse over, or something along those lines.

If I have time this afternoon, I’ll fire up Ethereal and poke around with it a bit to get a better sense of how it’s doing its thing (good, clean, wholesome nerd fun – whee!).

I’m trying it out. So far I’ve saved 14.2 seconds.

This is only really relevant if you a) have a slow connection, or go to b) really slow sites. In reality most of us here are using broadband, and most of the websites we go to are served by at least 10 mbps.

Since our HTTP requests are returned streaming, it may take 10 seconds for the whole page to stop loading, but it may take 5 seconds before the pertinent content becomes available. Then suppose you save 3 seconds via Google’s new tools, well that really doesn’t matter since those last 5 seconds didn’t matter to you anyways. Just think about how when you go to a site, it’s still “loading” (look in the top right icon), but you are already reading it.

That’s the worst case scenario sure, but still, if everything is as fast as possible, the only time you will wait before the website starts rendering would be the lag between you and the website, and then Google would only be faster if it had a faster response time.

So even if they do fix all these login issues people are having there really isn’t much of a big gain, and a big potential privacy loss.

Yep, one major game company that I moderate for has asked us to not use the Web Accelerator, at least until they can check on how it impacts the private sections of their forums.

Personally, I didn’t plan on using it, as I doubt I’d ever have a need for it. I can’t remember the last time I had a page that took longer than a couple of seconds to load, and…that’s what a local browser cache is supposed to handle anyway, as far as I’m concerned, and I keep that to a minimum. :roll:

http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2858

http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2858

http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2858

http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2858

WAHOO…that error page was just kidding, i guess
I didn’t realize I was so persistent (dumbass)

Could you repeat that? Newb… :lol: