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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."
But how does it know how many minutes you save?
will they provide you with your web surfing trend stats?
I am a republican not by choice, but rather by lack there of.
is this really able to speed stuff up if you have broadband? not sure if i really belive them.
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.
This is great news for dialup users that are being charged for this service through their own ISP.
To learn more, read our Google Web Accelerator Privacy Policy (http://webaccelerator.google.com/privacy).
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).
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Do they provide also an anonymizer service with this accelerator/proxy??
Incidentally, seperating code from view from data is probably the most effective way of cutting bandwidth. A report you look at 20 times a day, with different data, will download the file 20 times. The 'view' layer doesn't need to be downloaded again .. just the data!
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.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
- 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.main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Effectively, if it's a proxy, couldn't it be used to anonymously access the web?
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?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I can't really see what google (or anyone for that matter) can really do to accelerate web content on broadband connections. As I've said elsewhere, it sounds like they are running a caching server for you. I would guess you could get very near the same effect without the privacy problems with something like squid or Allegrosurf.
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 gzip html etc...
2)The google servers have a faster connection to the server than you do (they might have a faster general net connection, but the effective speed changes by the minute due to server load, net congestion etc...)
3) Your connection to the google servers is faster than your connection to the destination server. This is likely true right now, will it be with massively more load - IDK.
4) Your computer can decompress content and run the google background process faster than it can recieve textual information over a pretty fast line. This might be true, it depends on your PC, and it's load.
The only thing I haven't talked about is whether google is going to compress images. Personally I think it'd be kind of stupid becasue:
1) they'd have to do it lossy, and so now pics look like crap.
2) broadband is rather fast for most web pics now adays. Broadband is just tending to get faster. It doesn't really have the limitations dial-up does that make this attractive in any way.
There is no good reason to sign up for this. Unless you like feeding more info about yourself to a big company, or can't manage to get effective caching through cheap or OSS software on your PC.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Exactly. Now they can find pages that are rarely linked, yet may be valuable. I wonder if this also might allow them to search the 'deep web'. Imagine a user with this browsing an online chemistry database where the only way to find info is by filling out some text fields on a website. Now Google will be able to find this deep websites by having users due all the grunt work.
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.
most likely because they want to maximize the value of adsense. If everyone were all talking about how much money they were making on AdSense people would start propping up pages to target the most lucrative ads (they do already). The value of those ads would then go down. As it is it's all a big mystery and so people for the most part don't consider AdSense when deciding what content to put on-line.
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.
Work Safe Porn
Not just because of technical reasons (it might reduce the latency but it incurs more traffic and load on the machine and the Internet), but I am starting to feel uncomfortable of how aggressive Google has been trying to be. "Do no evil"? I hear the similar thing when Larry started to give away Bitkeeper to Open Source developers. Not that I say Larry is evil, but a company is a company. I cannot trust them without limits.
Epic 2014 is starting to happen with them aggregating information about browsing. It's almost scary. Check the website linked for a view into the future of what Google (and Amazon) may be doing do next. It's all speculation but sounds very interesting.
Right now I'm posting from IE and trying to figure out what it screwed up.
. jpg bookmarks, the address bar, and my personal toolbar links are gone.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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?
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
XPIs can be written in C++ as well.
http://www.iosart.com/firefox/xpcom/
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!