Google Web Accelerator 798
Lukey Boy writes "Google has released a free web accelerator product for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. According to their information page the software uses Google servers as a proxy for web content, delivering the pages to your system more rapidly and compressing them beforehand."
I keed! I keed! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm using it now and couldn't be happier! It's already saved me over 10 seconds, and there's no catch!
---
Find Google results for "catch" [google.ca]
Sign up for free webmail at http://gmail.google.com/ [google.com]
Resistance is fut... er... Try Google, we're not evil!
Re:I keed! I keed! (Score:4, Funny)
Sure I won't, but I am still annoyed I can't! (Score:5, Funny)
No Linux support either (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Linux support either (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Linux support either (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.iosart.com/firefox/xpcom/ [iosart.com]
However, I wouldn't be suprised if Google was hacking into the winsock or something and not just doing normal plug-in stuff.
Whoa, welcome to 1998 -- Slashdot automatically makes links!
Re:Sure I won't, but I am still annoyed I can't! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I keed! I keed! (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, the catch is google now knows your surfing habits, and their's no privacy policy.
Re:I keed! I keed! (Score:5, Funny)
their's no gramur eyethur
Re:I keed! I keed! (Score:5, Informative)
I clicked on the "Pricay Policy" link and saw this:
http://www.google.com/privacy.html [google.com]
No catch!? (Score:5, Funny)
monitor your surfing habits and email^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h
make your life easier!
Re:No catch!? (Score:4, Informative)
They say:
The problem is that this information, when correlated with information from web sites you're using such as user names, passwords, etc. (all of which would be routed through their proxy and caches except for https information which goes through the proxy but not the caches), can tell them, or anyone else who has access, exactly who you are, where you surf and what you do.Their privacy policies completely fail to address this issue.
Puts on Tinfoil Hat... (Score:5, Insightful)
So far at least, Google has arguably successfully Done No Evil - they've offered a great search site, extended their great search system to the desktop, embedded it into browsers for convenience, offered webmail with unprecedented storage space and lovely features, and even revitalised the online advertising industry away from obnoxious graphical banners and popups towards relevant, discrete and unobtrusive text ads.
However, against this background of saintly behaviour, the potential for great evil lurks. Take the Google Search cookie not expiring until 2038 - there is no reason whatsoever for this, apart from to make it easy to track your searching habits. Of course, they could just do this by aggregating all queries that hit their servers, but that wouldn't uniquely identify you down to your specific machine, would it?
Take GMail - it's a lovely idea, and a lovely system, but it does mean that (theoretically), Google now has unfettered access to your entire inbox, and all the personal information therein. They also make a big deal of how you "never have to delete anything ever again" - handy for users maybe, but definitely handy if you're interested in data-mining vast volumes of personal information.
Google Desktop Search is a lovely tool (and very handy), but it does have an annoying (and downplayed) habit (IIRC) of by default echoing any local searches you make to Google, so it can return lists of "web" and "desktop" matches. Not such a big deal, unless you're searching your local machine for, oh, I dunno... company credit card details? Passwords? Rarely-used logins? Where you left the downloaded "Hot XXX teen sluts.mpeg"? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Now look at the Google Web Accelerator - not only your searches, but now every single page you visit (and even some you don't - are these differentiated between?) passes through Google's systems. Fair play to them for excluding HTTPS requests, but in all fairness they couldn't ever have got away with caching those as well anyway.
At this point, (assuming you use Google and don't take regular tinfoil-hat precautions like clearing cookies/deleting old mail/never searching your local machine for anything private/etc), Google potentially has access to:
Hmmm.
I have to stress here that I severely doubt there's any kind of deliberate conspiracy going on. For my money this is just a case of a bunch of overenthusiastic geeks with access to a huge database to mine, who are too busy having fun to write privacy policies because "we'd never do anything bad anyway, and people know that".
However, this still doesn't mean that it's a good thing - power corrupts, and Google now has one hell of a lot of power. Even if Larry, Serge et al stay true to their vision, Google's a public company now - it only takes the board to fire L&S and replace them with a marketing puppet and all of a sudden your trust in Google isn't worth shit - they hold all the cards, and they've got your entire life written on them.
In addition, this getting carried away with where they're going, and not listening to user-opinion is exactly the kind of attitude that is most publicly (and damagingly) exhibited by Microsoft. It's a small step from not taking five minutes to assuage people's concerns to not taking five seconds to even consider them. Both attitudes exhibit a certain "I know better than you" arrogance, one which tends to only get worse with time, and the more people start complaining about it, the worse it tends to get.
As I said, I severely doubt Google
Re:I keed! I keed! (Score:5, Informative)
You can probably centralize this! (Score:4, Informative)
1) Compress all HTML content passed between Google and client
2) Use local cacheing
3) Send diffs (just what changed) of files that are in the cache but out of date.
I could refresh Slashdot over and over, and the only thing that I would have to download when the page changes is a compressed diff, probably a savings of at least an order of magnitude.
In the situation you describe though there are many computers using one connection. Since GWA interfaces with browsers via a simple HTTP proxy (The IE/Firefox integration is just for the "x seconds saved" display), you should be able to install GWA on one computer and set multiple other computers to use that proxy.
Of course Google might check to see if the machine making the request is on localhost.
Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
First, they collect your search information. Next they collected your email. Now they collect your destination. You put it all together, that is quite a bit of information.
What is next?
Very Smart..Very Scary...
Tinfoil, Post!
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? I just Googled for this very topic and there is absolutly no proof of that sort of thing. Ever. To Anyone. You'd think that if it were true somebody would have blogged about it. So you must just be parinoid.
--MarkusQ
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Funny)
Now try and prove you aren't a terrorist if they say you are...
Exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. There are lots of cool things they could do with the information, used in aggregate. They could recommend websites to you by correlating your browsing history with others, kind of the same way Amazon.com recommends products. I for one think that would be cool.
Re:Exactly. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Funny)
"Based on your recent browsing habits, Google would like to suggest MidgetsHavingSexWithFerretsInSpace.com"
All I wanted was a smaller computer, a pet toy, and some homework help....GOOOOOOOGLEEEEEEEEEe
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, it's not always "now" that these problems occur. One reason that one maintains strict ethical breaks between various organizations is not to protect them when they're strong, but on the assumption that one is not always strong every day.
I heard a few years back that Reader's Digest was not doing economically well and that their biggest asset turned out to be a repository of the reading habits of a huge part of the US population. Even if they were not inclined to sell out, they were still candidate for takeover by another company buying them just for this data and not for their editorial work or revenue stream. I didn't end up following the news, so I don't know how it turned out, or even that this account I'd heard was correct. (Maybe someone else knows better can offer more info here.) But even if you take it only as a hypothetical, it seems pretty plausible that such things could happen.
Big companies have sometimes fallen. And one would like to believe we haven't entered a political climate where that will never happen again, even if one doesn't have a deathwish for any particular big company. So what if Google gets all this stuff and then gets either nervous or outright cheap... If their size and economic power is what protects us now, what protects us then?
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which makes me wonder:
...My company's firewall filters some objectionable content
...My company's firewall does not filter Google
...would I (or others) be able to surf for objectionable content through Google and bypass the company firewall this way?
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmmm...I wonder how long it will take before my company recognizes that I am no longer opening connections to multiple sites...
Re:Exactly. (Score:3, Interesting)
correct (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, they might use info about popular pages and browsing habits to improve search results (like I'm sure they are doing now with the Search History feature).
Andrew
PS: As soon as I saw this on GoogleBlog I realized the 'privacy' freaks were going to flip. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what I mean. Thousands of pages with nothing but keywords, some random readable text, and links to pages whose ranking they want to pump. These have become sofisticated enough that you can't tell them apart from real web pages just by looking at their linking patterns.
So what's the difference? Real pages are actually visited by people while spam pages aren't. You can use aggregated browsing data to set apart useful from non-useful pages.
Add this to Trust Rank and you got a winner. All you need is a very large amount of bandwidth.
Re:correct (Score:4, Interesting)
This may also help them determine which links are also useful. Remember that blog software company that was caught hosting spam pages (it was on
Andrew
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
- The content of each webpage (text, images, video, anything really)
- The number of pages that link to a page in question
- The words that people use to link to a page
- The sites that people click on after searching for a term
These by themselves generate pretty good results, but sometimes this information can be deceptive. The more metrics you have to measure relevance by, the better.So now, Google offers to cache the Internet from everyone. What can they get out of this? Well, everyone here is speculating about the evil things, so I'll leave those as a given. What I haven't seen so far is a very valuable piece of information they get from this: web traffic. They get to see how many people go to web sites, what time, where they got referred from, and anything else that can be deciphered from someone's web traffic. Not only can they rank pages by how many people link to a page, they get to see how often each link is actually used to get to the page. That's extremely valuable, because it's hard to fake convincingly. Web sites won't be able to plant links around the Internet to increase their ranking, because if no one actually clicks the link, then it's not important in the first place. That is awesome.
Why didn't I think of that?
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Informative)
Yahoo and presumably Alexa do send referrer information if WebRank is enabled. [yahoo.com] I don't know what percentage of people turn off WebRank, but with Web Accelerator, there's no opting out if you use it.
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
They want to know what everyone is searching for in a given moment, and model their advertising business around that information. This is the purpose behind Gmail and Google Groups.
This is their business model. They are an Ad business first, and a search engine second.
They will gain information from your personal browsing records. Their advertising business can use this information with direct-market advertisements, future trend prediction, etc.
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Funny)
They want to know what everyone is searching for in a given moment
that's the easy part:
- lesbian sex
- natalie portman
- desperate housewives
- desparate housewives having lesbian sex with natalie portman
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, money? Yes, in the end of course they need to profit from it. Google is not charity organization, and have a ton of expenses. However,money how? is a more interesting question.
I can't believe Google will simply sell the results to some third party -- that would look pretty bad PR-wise, and Google has so far tried to avoid these things as well as possible. Something more commonly seen with Google is beating the competition by providing good and accurate search services. If they do that, they gain a larger market share since they're simply better, and that will make companies willing to pay more for AdWords. Tadaa, Google in a nutshell, and how they've always worked.
So I basically think it may have something to do with this [slashdot.org]. What better foundation for a TrustRank system can you get, than one where you know how visited sites are? Scam sites would only get sporadic visitors from fooled Internet users and have their PageRank drop like a rock, while news sites, popular gaming sites, and so on, would get large numbers of returning users. Cross-linking scam sites would find out that their exploits wouldn't work very well anymore, and Google could possible tune their rank system to let both PageRank and TrustRank have an influence on the final rank. Sounds like the regular Google philosophy of conquering by improving. And they'd need our browsing habits to pull it off.
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that your Usenet posts [google.com], where you're going or where you live [google.com], what you're buying [google.com], what kind of news you're interested in [google.com], and maybe even who your friends are [orkut.com].
But all that's only true if you give them the information. Even so, the quantity that Google could know about me just given all the Google stuff I've used from one single IP address is rather alarming.
But I don't mind. This is partly because I don't think they're jerks (as far as public corporations go, anyway), but mostly still because I don't think they really care.
If we had a lot of evidence they did care, then I suspect that there would immediately exist a movement for 'free', anonymous versions of whatever services Google currently provides.
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
"
I apologize, but I think that you are being naive.
Perhaps they are not 'jerks' but they do care. Every thing that they log is information. Knowledge is Power.
Just my thoughts.
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
But what I also trust is that they will open their doors and computers very wide to the first FBI agent with a supboena, especially with the full weight of The [i-newswire.com] Patriot [wikipedia.org] Act. [slashdot.org]
Judges are handing wiretapping orders out like confetti, [slashdot.org] so you need to consider that any information held by any company belongs to the government at any time. All your base belong to us. And what's even scarier is that no-one is allowed to talk about it - all requests for info come with gag orders.
I'd be willing to bet that Google have already been approached for information.
What i'd like to know is what sort of data mining expertise the FBI is gathering in preparation for getting their hands on all googles files.
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:3, Interesting)
Google's *founders* said that, and you or I may trust them, because they're geeks and they're doing cool stuff. But did google shareholders say that too?
Whatever information Google now has that it is choosing not to use or is using in a benign manner *will* eventually be used to detriment of Google users' privacy if the shareholders decide it's gonna raise their "value".
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
do no evil! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Don't worry. Their motto is 'do no evil', so we can trust them!", say the geek masses.
Dow Chemical's motto is "Living. Improved Daily". Unless you're one of 15,000-30,000 people in Bhopal, India [wikipedia.org], of course.
Ford's motto is "Ford: Quality is #1". Well, except for the Ford Pinto (or its modern equivalent, the Ford Crown Victoria, which is burning police to death left+right). Or Ford Explorers, where management ignored engineering reports saying the roof pillars were substantially weaker. Or ignition switches in millions of Ford vehicles which would catch fire- even if you weren't using the car? Then there's the Ford Focus, which I think is close to setting the world record on factory recalls...
Then there's GE- "we bring good things to life". Well, I don't think the people who have been harmed by dioxin poisoning would agree with you there. But hey, GE will sell you a nice water filtration system (seriously- go into Home Depot, GE is the featured brand. Note how it brags about removing industrial toxins?)
Microsoft says "enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential", something I think we can all give a good chortle about, considering how grossly unreliable virtually every Windows release has been, how incompatible their software is one year to the next, piss-poor interoperability, anticompetitive practices, licensing costs, spyware, viruses, etc.
Need I go on to prove that corporate PR lines are just that- nothing more than PR lines? Or should I mention that Google AdSense terms prohibited AdSense customers from discussing, in public or private, their experience/satisfaction with AdSense? Hmm. Now, why would a "do no evil" corporation do something like that?
Re:do no evil! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think if Google actually wanted to adhere to "Do No Evil", they wouldn't be gone public with their IPO.
Public companies do whatever they can to maximize profits, I've even read (although I believe this was on
There is also a long ways between "Do No Evil", and "Do Good Things".
On a side note, I use both gmail and google, I remember the pre-google days when searching was just painful. I hope that google will not
why no talking about adsense (Score:5, Interesting)
The other problem with talking about AdSense performance is that your success or failure a) can't be proven and b) could influence other's decisions to or not to market using Adsense. How well or not someone else's site is doing with AdSense has exactly zero to do with how well it will do on your site but people think it does anyway.
If Google took away the gag you'd have thousands of people bitching about how little their site is making and it would make Google look bad even though it has nothing to do with them. Sorry but your crappy little Geocities site isn't going to generate enough traffic to allow you to quit your day job. You'd also have people going on and on about how much they're making which would cause people to have unrealistic expectations.
Google wants entire control of the PR side of AdSense which is reasonable. It's how they pay the bills and make investors happy.
Re:do no evil! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:do no evil! (Score:5, Informative)
Nice troll. Inflamatory, and correct only by a tenuous strand of tortured logic. It was Union Carbide who gassed Bhopal, which didn't merge with Dow until 1999, a full fifteen years after the incident, and five years after Union Carbide sold its 51% interest in the Bhopal facility.
Re:do no evil! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if there is a god (I prefer to believe in the provable) but the fact that I can cope with a possible god knowing everything about me doesn't mean I like it. Theres not a hell of a lot we can do about a possible god, google on the other hand...
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing they might do is some compression, but this assumes a number of things to make your connection faster:
1) the content isn't already compressed. Lots of sites already
Why you "can't really see" (Score:5, Informative)
The reason you're skeptical is because you don't know as much about the Internet as google does.
When you download a web page on your 6Mbps cable modem, do you think it instanly goes to 6Mbps throughput, transfers the page, and then drops to zero? It doesn't. The efficiency *decreases* as your connection gets faster (which is why google does not claim to speed up slow connections - there's little room for improvement). Here's why:
The TCP stack under your browser starts by establishing a connection (3 way handshake). Then it sends a packet with the HTTP request. Finally after those long round trip times of basically doing nothing, your browser starts receiving HTML. As the HTML comes in, the process repeats for the embedded stuff (images). If you have a fast link (and especially if the server is far away), your link spends a lot of time doing nothing while connections are established and transactions take place.
By routing your connection through google, many efficiencies can be gained. These are listed in, of all places TFA [google.com]. It's not just caching, either. Prefetching, for example, is a trick where their servers will start requesting and transferring the images within a web page, even before your browser has requested them. Since the HTML already went through google's proxy, they know what your browser is going to request before your browser does.
So instead of just pooh-poohing it because you don't understand the technology, why don't you go download a copy of Ethereal [ethereal.com], which will let you see these tricks in action. Then you can offer us a more educated opinion based on empirical fact, instead of a long diatribe amounting to "I don't understand how it works, therefore it sucks".
Re:Why you "can't really see" (Score:5, Informative)
One, you can do prefetching without selling your soul to google. Allegrosurf is good at this.
Two, pipelining. All modern browsers use pipelining, which severely limits the amount of handshaking that needs to be done to a server.
Final comment, from what I've seen, the people who are using this program (at least with Opera) seem to see no improvement in the first hour or so of use. In fact, some are reporting slowdowns.
I maintain my reservations about this being able to offer a significant boost to browsing, especially when contrasted to the major privacy intrusion.
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:3, Funny)
DoubleClick? What does 127.0.0.1 know that it didn't know already?
Google turns Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Google turns Evil (Score:3, Funny)
Google's value: $4.8 billion
weasello's value: $29.93
Hmm, (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmm, (Score:3, Informative)
I assume it would calculate your current download speed as well as the size of the information you're retrieving, then do the same based on going through Google's servers, and come up with an approximate value of saved time.
Something like that anyhow I think.
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
Slashdot effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot effect? (Score:5, Interesting)
So it sounds to me that if the website being slashdotted is cache-able (and the slashdotters have this accelerator), it could ease the website's server load.
Improved Page Rank (Score:5, Insightful)
Do no evil, i hope (Score:3, Funny)
free webstats (Score:5, Interesting)
The irony.. (Score:3, Funny)
hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
More info (Score:5, Informative)
Already one privacy problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, browsers other than Firefox and Mozilla can take advantage of GWA if you set them to proxy requests over Localhost:9100 while GWA is running in the system tray.
So basically, if anybody else is logged into the same system as you at the same time, they can figure out whether or not you have visited any given page by connecting to your GWA installation and seeing whether or not the page downloads faster than your Internet connection speed.
isn't this basically a proxy? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've RTF(ine)A and I give... what makes this different/better/faster/whatever than a proxy server?
And, while I'm at it.... I submit my vote that Google make linux/*nix versions of their stuff more quickly/readily. I find it no small irony that a company that relies on over 10,000 linux servers (actually I think the number may exceed 40,000) essentially making them one of the largest benficiaries of the OSS community they don't yet have a Google Desktop, nor are offering a beta of this accelerator for the linux community.
Don't get me wrong, I like Google, think they've done great stuff, but come on -- how about paying back a little to the hand that giveth.
Re:isn't this basically a proxy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing really that I can see other than that it will always compress which is something that some sites do not have enabled, which should offer some speed ups and help reduce over all web traffic. I'd assume that this is tied into Google's cache used on the search engine, so if you request a page through the proxy for which the cached data is stale it will update that also, then re-index the data for the search engine. If so, this could be *very* useful for alleviating things like the Slashdot effect, although it would need to pull the graphics to be of any real use here. The problem with caching the graphics though, is that it's going to make it *really* difficult for Ad-Blockers to work out which files are ads and which are not...
Re:isn't this basically a proxy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, draw another circle inside that one, almost exactly the same size, but not quite. These are the F/OSS zealots who won't install anything unless it's GNU licenced.
The area between the boundaries of those two circles are the only people who would install it. And I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure the other guy in that part of the chart understands that.
Re:isn't this basically a proxy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh, it's not ironic at all. As you said, they use Linux servers, not desktops. Those servers don't need Google Desktop or Webaccelerator.
Don't get me wrong, I like Google, think they've done great stuff, but come on -- how about paying back a little to the hand that giveth.
You think they're trying to do Windows users a favor by releasing these products? They're doing it for themselves. They make money off of these products by solidifying their mindshare and marketshare. Releasing Linux versions (or OS X versions, for that matter) obviously isn't worth it to them.
Great for dial up users (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this like... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh... yes.
Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:
* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:3, Funny)
I'm a little too paranoid for this one... (Score:5, Interesting)
To learn more, read our Google Web Accelerator Privacy Policy (http://webaccelerator.google.com/privacy [google.com]).
Does anyone know if the accelerator gives you the option to omit certain webpages from your accelerating experience, or is this going to turn into a huge information mine? (Not that the two are exclusive, there are going to be users who just blindly send anything through the accelerator regardless).
Re:I'm a little too paranoid for this one... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, domains yes, specific pages, no. [spywareinfo.com] And they even let you turn off the autoupdater if you want. First time I've ever seen that from Google.
What I'd to know is how this helps a broadband connection but not dial-up. My connection already loads most pages nearly instantly.
So let me get this straight ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anonymizer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Geo IP users now think I moved to Mountain View (Score:3, Funny)
I noticed a geo ip advertisement at thehun that normally recognizes I live in Phoenix and offering to introduce me to hookers in Phoenix. Now though, it wants to introduce me to hookers in Mt. View.
So that sucks.
So once google owns the entire internet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I'm anti-google. But it's amazing all the things they've gotten themselves into. Now they're apparently going to cache (pieces of) the internet for us.
Though this might finally be a usefull tool to get around the
Re:So once google owns the entire internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens when a site changes their content to something GOOG (or their sponsors) don't like and they conveniently forget to update their cached version?
It would be a little like the MiniTruth*, wouldn't it?
I fear for the freedom of information in the digital age, bits and bytes are a lot easier than print to manipulate.
* 1984, George Orwell: The Ministry of Truth, the government department responsible for adjusting historical documents and books to conform to today's version of history.
No thanks! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No thanks! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds interesting.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I the only one a little shocked at this? What's to stop another company from swooping in and buying Google with all your assorted information? Or, to stop Google itself from using this information in a way that most people wouldn't want them to?
Obligatory Murphy's Law derivative quote: "If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something."
Does it anonymize requests? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that google doesn't keep logs to let law enforcement see who you are, but in theory, the logs of the sites visited would see google unless they explicitly told them you're ip correct?
This Has Little To Do With Web Acceleration... (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, running the web accelerator allows google to have compressed copies of all their pre-generated search pages and use the proprietary webaccelerator internals to give them a strategic advantage over web publishers/services/searches- Imagine the benefits this could have on their internal server load if adopted by 90% of web suers...
In typical Google fashion, a very clever move!
I'm not going to install this thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting. But wise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Msr. Francois in France browses a Nazi site and Google happily provides the content to him via the handy web accelerator. Can the French go after Google now? (as if they're not already).
Chinese government demands that Google strip out offensive content and replace any references to Li Hongzhi [google.com] with "<insert insult here>". Will Google comply? Has such a demand been made before [detnews.com] ?
Plus, what about copyrights and such? Will Google be held liable for pushing out outdated pages? How will the servers (from where Google is grabbing pages) get their statistics? And since Google will be sort-of screen-scraping, why does Google object to it themselves?
Just some questions that come to mind.
Well, thank goodness. (Score:4, Funny)
Works under linux! (Score:4, Informative)
1) Install on a Windows box
2) Copy Program Files\Google\Web Accelerator files to linux box
3) "wine GoogleWebAccWarder.exe &"
4) Set your browser proxy to "localhost" port 9100
5) Surf with speed
If it fails, check your windows\temp directory for the google logs...
Note - this comment posted with Google Web Accelerator.
It Hosed my Firefox 1.0.3 install (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox wouldn't launch after install. After rebooting I see this http://img115.echo.cx/img115/6282/firefoxhosed5wg
Not exactly what I expect from Google. Although I'm sure its working fine for others I have a plain jane install that gives me no grief. It did work on IE btw, but it totally screwed up Firefox. Uninstalling did NOT fix the problem.
I don't own a tin foil hat... but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Website visits
Emails
Web Searches
Photos
Hard Disk Drive contents
Hard Disk Drive searches
Just the aggregation of this data on people who use all of their services could make their current income seam like pennies. This is the type of think that governments like a lot, not just large corporations. I know they have a "don't be evil" pholosophy (their words) but shit, even Skynet was nice at one point.
Re:Squeezable Software (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why CSS is a good thing. You're not downloading the look & feel of the site every time you make a non-cached request. Getting the data out of their too would go a long way towards cutting down on the amount of useless bits browsers have to download over and over again.
Re:Squeezable Software (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless you use MSIE, whose handling of the cache is terrible. If you have an URL www.example.com/style.css MSIE will cache it. However, if the URL is something like foo.example.com/style.css, it will not cache it, thus actually increasing the
Re:Once again Google forgets us. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What does Google gain from this? (Score:5, Interesting)
- More aggressive preloading of top search results (made possible because Google is providing the bandwidth, so they're not wasting other people's bandwidth), makes Google search results more responsive => people rely on Google more
- In the future, improved google ad relevancy by serving you ads related to your browsing habits (Sign me up! maybe I'd actually get ads that are useful to me instead of the normal crap ones. You can always turn it off when you want privacy, so stop frothing at the mouth already.)
Of course, people are going to be crying "spyware"! But this is different from most spyware. Firstly, it doesn't clog up your Windows installation and slow down or crash your computer; in fact it speeds up your browsing. Secondly, you can turn it off, or uninstall it if you want. Thirdly, you only get it if you explicitly download it. Fourthly, it might actually improve Google's relevancy for search results and ads, which would benefit me directly. And finally, so many people are watching Google right now that the instant they do something evil, everybody on the globe will know about it. If that happens, it's trivial to switch to a competitor. And that's exactly why they *won't* be doing anything evil.Re:SPEED UP YOUR INTENET BY 500% (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup...and they all got found out. So you can bether ass that if google did, we'll find out too. And then google and it's adwords/sense is history.
But why would google commit suicide like that? I'm betting they won't, you're saying they are and have. I say show me proof, or pipe down. And if nothing fishy has been detected within, oh, say two weeks?, I'm gonna keep on assuming Google's OK and that you're wrong.