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Google Web Accelerator
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."
More information about GWA is posted here: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050504-1453 07
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. It should also be pointed out that this is apparently geared towards broadband users.
...a proxy which just compressed stuff on the server and then decompresses it on the client?
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.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
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.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
You mean Googledot?
".. and there's no catch!"
Unfortunately, the catch is google now knows your surfing habits, and their's no privacy policy.
I can't really see what google (or anyone for that matter) can really do to accelerate web content on broadband connections. [...] There is no good reason to sign up for this.
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. 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, 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".
No privacy policy?
I clicked on the "Pricay Policy" link and saw this:
http://www.google.com/privacy.html
-- Brendan Hills