Google Offers Jump in Search Speed, Anyone tried this out?

[/////AMG]

Google Labs has released a beta version of its Web Accelerator software designed to make surfing the Internet faster and more efficient.

The search giant said the latest application will speed the online experience and save significant amounts of time when pulling up Web pages.

"Web Accelerator is an application that uses Google's global computer network to make Web pages load faster," the company said.

There are numerous strategies Google has employed to make Web browsing faster, including sending page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Web Accelerator traffic. It also stores copies of frequently viewed pages to make them quickly accessible.

The software downloads only Web pages that have been updated since they were last visited by a viewer, the company said. It also "prefetches" pages onto a computer in advance and then manages Internet connections to reduce delays, compressing the data before sending it out.

However, for security reasons the software does not speed the transfer of pages encrypted with the HTTPS: protocol, Google said.

Dial-up users will not experience a speed enhancement because the program has been optimized for broadband connections, Google said.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is also working to improve the ranking methods on Google News.

Continue this article at Internetnews.com

Download this at http://webaccelerator.google.com/

[dragonone]

if u read around the blogs a bit, you'll realize that this accelerator is only good for the public. For many administrators and developers, it deletes important links and certain code needs to be implemented.

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/google_web_accelerator_hey_not_so_fast_an_alert_for_web_app_designers.php

"Google’s web accelerator seems like a good thing for the public web, but it can wreak havok on web-apps and other things with admin-links built into the UI. How’s that?

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway.

We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were “disappearing.” We were stumped until we dug a little deeper and discovered this Web Accelerator behavior. Once we figured this out we added some code to prevent Google from prefetching the pages and clicking the links, but it was quite disconcerting.

This wouldn’t be much of a problem on the public web since it’s pretty tough to be destructive on public web pages, but web apps, with their admin links here and there, can be considerably damaged. If you have a web app, it might be worth returning a 403 when the HTTP_X_MOZ is set to “prefetch” header is sent. This will keep Web Accelerator from clicking destructive links. Here’s an FAQ on prefetching for more information.

Update: If you use Ruby on Rails for your web-apps, here’s some code to just say no to Google Accelerator."

[/////AMG]

Google Web Accelerator sparks privacy fears
Dan Ilett
ZDNet UK
May 05, 2005, 17:45 BST

Early users of Google's Web Accelerator tool are fretting that they could disclose more than they bargained for


A software tool launched by Google on Wednesday that speeds up the process of downloading Web sites has caused some users to worry about their privacy.

Google Web Accelerator, which was released in beta, is set up to automatically work with Firefox and Internet Explorer once it's been downloaded. The service stores copies of sites frequently accessed by individual PCs and automatically retrieves new data from those pages, so that a Web browser needs to process only updates to those sites when asked to load them. It can also automatically "pre-fetch" frequently used Web sites before the user downloads it.

However, users are concerned that the service can cache more data from their computers than they would prefer.

On a Google Labs discussion group, one user said that the security implications of Google caching details of Internet sessions were unacceptable.

"I went to the Futuremark forums and noticed that I'm logged in as someone I don't know. Great, I've used Google's Web Accelerator for a couple of hours, visited lots of sites where I'm logged in. Now I wonder how many people used my cache. I understand it's a beta, sure, but something like that is totally unacceptable."

Google was not immediately available for comment, but said in a Web site statement that the service can receive information such as the user's IP address, computer and connection information, and "personally identifiable information", such as an email address.

"Whenever your computer sends cookies with browsing or prefetching page requests for unencrypted sites, we temporarily cache these cookies in order to improve performance," the company wrote on its Web site.

Information entered in SSL connections, such as Internet banking, will not be cached, the company wrote.

The service is only available to broadband subscribers.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/...39197327,00.htm (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39197327,00.htm)