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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."
Cute...
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!
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
When is google going to learn that aggregation is not the way of the future? They will eventually become so large their shareholders will be able to turn them into a giant evil machine, much lik current companies.
Could this solve the slashdot effect problem, if we're all running it? Are ads associated with it?
what are they going to do with it?
/. effect.
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
What's next? Hopefully a calender. I'd love a free online replacement for Outlook.
It's because they already know that Linux users wouldn't allow their web browsing to tracked, documented, and compiled for future usage.
Bleh. I use the Yahoo calendar at work. It's OK. But I want a GoOOogle calendar. Because I want to keep my contacts, search results, etc., in one place. And I really dislike Yahoo mail, at least the free version.
Google offering to proxy the web for everyone cannot make sense unless they're planning to make a lot of money from your personal browsing records. In all honesty, and without wanting to sound like a troll, I think "Don't be evil" just died.
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.
Add to that your Usenet posts, where you're going or where you live, what you're buying, what kind of news you're interested in, and maybe even who your friends are.
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.
I think that a word of caution is needed here. Now Google, in it's current state, seems to defy the "laws of business." I for one hope that it remains an honest company that continues producing software that is innovative and desired. People trust Google way more than any other company in recent memory. Google has access now, through their software, to every file, search, website you visit, password, personal detail, and photo you have (assuming you use all their software).
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."
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
"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, 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?
Please help metamoderate.
"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.
"
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.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Draw a circle. This is all the people using a F/OSS desktop environment.
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.
and adding the pages to thier index if they dont know about them, so they dont have to crawl for them.
This is a great way to make sure popular pages are fresh in the search engine index.
I still find it strange that people will panic about a company that collects some personal information yet they'll cope with the fact that there's a god, somewhere, knowing all...
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...
...and everything to do with decreasing loads/speeding up Google sites. After using it for several minutes, I noticed that any froogle/googlegroups/google search I do has marked time savings- more than any other sites I found (except CNN front page, which is also much faster and well suited for this kind of thing...)
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!
Not only that, you can't run it on Linux. I can't see why the Firefox version couldn't be a normal XPI instead of a Windows executable.
This could be used to provide a better Page Rank. Instead of determining worth based on links that exist, they will determine it based on links that are used.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
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 Patriot Act.
Judges are handing wiretapping orders out like confetti, 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.
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 with "<insert insult here>". Will Google comply? Has such a demand been made before ?
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.
Not only that, but it is also a beautiful solution to all the googlebombing, keyword-linking pages.
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.
You forgot:
- Improving search results by giving preference to popular web pages (as in most visited).
- Improving search results by ignoring spam-pages identified by simply looking for well-linked pages that nobody visits.
"right , they all say that"
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.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
There's one thing we must consider. Let's give them full benefit of the doubt now. They are aggregating this information for the most non-evil purposes that exist. The problem is, what if the Google culture changes five or ten years from now. What if somehow the founders are forced out and the Google is run by people with nefarious intentions. Worse, what if Google corp. falls on hard times, gets desperate, and sees selling information as a quick fix when they are in a pickle. That would be my big worry.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
Um... what licence agreement doesn't include a phrase very similar to that?
Many people will use many, if not all, of Googles services. That means one single company can aggregate the data of a persons:
...and now everything about every page they visit, cookies and all, since they are acting as a proxy!
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.
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
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
and the difference between this and onspeed is what exactly?
They have a question about a design of a system like this in their tech interview questions arsenal.
In the interview I was in the question was framed to address the problem of serving Google content to developing countries and other places with poor network connectivity. I wonder, if the purpose of the web accelerator is to make Google more accessible in those kind of environments than their (graphics-heavy) competitors.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you