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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.
will they provide you with your web surfing trend stats?
I am a republican not by choice, but rather by lack there of.
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.
...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.
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.
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?" `":" #");}
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
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. 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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"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
Bottles.
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.
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.
and their's no privacy policy
their's no gramur eyethur
No privacy policy?
I clicked on the "Pricay Policy" link and saw this:
http://www.google.com/privacy.html
-- Brendan Hills
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