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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."
I'm using it now and couldn't be happier! It's already saved me over 10 seconds, and there's no catch!
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Find Google results for "catch"
Sign up for free webmail at http://gmail.google.com/
Resistance is fut... er... Try Google, we're not evil!
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.
But how does it know how many minutes you save?
Could this solve the slashdot effect problem, if we're all running it? Are ads associated with it?
Considering this looks like a way for google to simply track every site i visit.. i sure hope they really aren't.. "evil".. :-/
MABASPLOOM!
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.
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.
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.
...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.
Holy Cow! Google got slashdotted!
My little site.
Next they modify the data you receive to influence your opinion.
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??
How far does Jon von Tetzchner have to frick'n swim before Google starts supporting Opera?
What's next? Hopefully a calender. I'd love a free online replacement for Outlook.
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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.
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.
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"
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.
Read the info page. You just have to point your proxy settings to localhost:9100.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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...
- 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?" `":" #");}
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
...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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank goodness. One of my biggest computer problems is the slowness of web pages loading. I remember back when I had a modem, and pages loaded like lightning because the Internets were not very crowded yet. Now that everyone and their brother has the broadbands on their machines, it's too crowded. I hate waiting in line. Hooray for google!
they can't really 'own' the internet until this web accelerator can stop you from accessing certain sites
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.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Works with Wine:
:)
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.
æeee!
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.
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
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 visited thehun.org while running dumeter as I wanted to see what a link heavy site would do to the Google Web Accelerator.
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.
The GWA does three things that save bandwidth:
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.
and their's no privacy policy
their's no gramur eyethur
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".
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.
Now try and prove you aren't a terrorist if they say you are...
Come play Moral Decay!
Nice try, but Yahoo! Mail works perfectly through the Google Web Accelerator. Better even.
No privacy policy?
I clicked on the "Pricay Policy" link and saw this:
http://www.google.com/privacy.html
-- Brendan Hills
Everything Google does lately is designed to
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!
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
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