Google Announces Google CDN

leetrout writes "Google has introduced their Page Speed Service which 'is the latest tool in Google's arsenal to help speed up the web. When you sign up and point your site's DNS entry to Google, they'll enable the tool which will fetch your content from your servers, rewrite your webpages, and serve them up from Google's own servers around the world.'"

Comments

Re:all your base...

[queen of everything]

how long until we just rename it to the "googlenet"?

But what about non-static pages?

[Crudely_Indecent]

So, it rewrites my HTML, but what about my PHP (Perl, Python, your_scripting_language_here)?

Re:But what about non-static pages?

[icebraining]

Actually, any site benefits from using a separate domain - browsers limit the number of connections per domain, so by using two you can speed up the site considerably.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rtt.html#ParallelizeDownloads

Re:But what about non-static pages?

[Mr. DOS]

Serving static content from a subdomain or just another domain (e.g., Facebook's fbcdn.net) can also improve the load times because the browser won't have any cookies associated with that domain, and therefore won't lose time sending a pile of irrelevant content along with every HTTP request.

Re:But what about non-static pages?

[serviscope_minor]

Not much of the web is static these days.

Actually, almost all of it is, still.

Images: static. Videos: static. Big blob of CSS downloaded with the page: static. Big blob of javascript downloaded by the page: also static. Sure, there is some non-static HTML, but the job of that is to arrange a bunch of much larger static objects things on a page.

And insert ads

[coinreturn]

I presume they'll be inserting ads into your website!

Re:And insert ads

[DigiShaman]

Maybe. If you don't plan on paying or shit, why not? OTOH you pay a small fee to opt out of ads, that would be ok too.

When someone offers a "free" service, it's not really free. Almost always there is a hidden catch of some sort. This idea. This mentality that everything in the world should be free with no strings attached is ludicrous. Either you read and accept the TOS, or you don't.

Re:And insert ads

[Anrego]

Oh man.. nostalgia flashback to the geocities days :D

I remember entire sites dedicated to little bits of script you'd put in your pages to trick various the free website providers "ad insertion code" into pluggin their ad code into an invisible frame or commented out section or used javascript to remove the ad after the fact!

Re:And insert ads

[darkmeridian]

Google is not offering this as a free service once this comes out of beta. The introduction page says that they intend to charge for it once it comes out of limited beta testing. Otherwise, I guess everyone would go with the cheapest possible webhost then have Google pick up the hosting slack.

Re:all your base...

[Chrisq]

Would that make a Wifi access point a G-spot? I can see the support calls "try pinging your G-spot"

No surpises here really

[tomcatuk]

So in 2010 they tell webmasters speed is now a ranking factor. A few months later they launch a paid for service for webmasters to improve speed. Cynical? Me? Possibly...

Re:No surpises here really

[outsider007]

Speed should be a ranking factor. They still need to demonstrate better latency than competing CDNs if they want my business.

CDN for images only?

[joshuao3]

This seems like an amazing simple solution for the biggest bandwidth hogs on my servers--the images. But, it seems like it's not set up to perform in this role satisfactorily. In the FAQs, it looks like they recompress images. I'm pretty sure I'd never want another site to monkey with my, or my clients', images. An elegant and nearly transparent way to install a CDN this may be, but unless they are willing to never ever mess with my content, I don't think this will work for me. At this point move along, there is nothing to see here.

Opera...again

[guppysap13]

Not sure if anyone has heard of it before, but Opera has had a similar feature built in for a while called Opera Turbo, which compresses pages on their servers before they are downloaded to the browser. It's also how Opera on the iPhone works, because of Apple's restrictions.

Re:Opera...again

[mounthood]

There's a current web site/service offering this but focused on protection: blocking SQL injection, botnet spam, etc... I can't for the life of me remember what it's called. They act as a CDN and reverse proxy too, but speeding up the sites was more of a side effect of reducing the number of queries by something like 30%.

Re:all your base...

[afidel]

And while Google has quite a few strategically placed datacenters around the world it's hard to get closer to the user than Akamai which has servers in probably 85% of the worlds large POP's.

Re:all your base...

[somersault]

I'd be okay with giving to give anyone who cares to ask a comprehensive list of my interests. Unfortunately for Google and advertisers, they only get my interests, not the ad revenue.

Apple is the one who has the little padded cells. Google have improved the internet, and probably even the whole tech industry the most out of any company in the last decade. There are a whole lot of benefits that have come our way - easily the best search since 1998, gigabytes of free inbox space, free online office suite capabilities, a popular and open mobile OS etc. A lot more benefits than Apple have provided. They made MP3 players popular, and then capacitive touch phones with swooshy interfaces.. that's about it. Microsoft have given us.. well, I can't think of anything to be honest.

Re:all your base...

[Enderandrew]

You say the benefits only go one way, but aren't the users receiving more and more free services?

If you don't like the trade-off of seeing ads for those free services, you don't use them. How is this arrangement deceptive or evil? Just because they're big doesn't mean they're some nasty conspiracy.

Re:Holy shit

[Em Ellel]

Holy shit, 6 out of 7 respondents to the GP (all but anredo) completely missed the point. [insert standard complaint about slashdot going downhill].

Web pages with script are not static, and caching the HTML script output does nothing. Server-side code generally has to be run per-visitor. Akamai has all sorts of crazy custom XML to specify which portions are static.

Setting up a proper CDN for the modern web is more complicated than just redirecting some DNS entries.

LOL. Talk about pot calling kettle black. This is what happens when you read the slashdot summary instead of the source material. Allow me to explain what you are missing - what Google is doing is not a CDN at all, its just a bad summary. They are providing an optimizing proxy - it could care less if your content is static or dynamic, as long as it generates HTML output, it will work. It is unclear from first glance if the proxy is a caching proxy - I would guess it is - but even then it would be a stretch to call it a CDN in a modern sense of the word.

Akamai? Inktomi?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Funny how all of the slashdotters are talking about privacy issues instead of this service's potential to disrupt the paid CDN industry. I wonder what Akamai thinks about this development? Or the folks at Inktomi (now part of Yahoo, I believe) for that matter?

Re:all your base...

[cjcela]

Well, the problem is that even if you choose not to use their services, others will, and the general state of things is shifted more and more towards the world depending on 3 or 4 companies. So Google owning most of the world data and Internet services it is not necessarily evil now, but it will certainly narrow the options for everybody in the future.

Re:all your base...

[Enderandrew]

Except in the areas that putting data together enables humans to do more with the data.

And Google has been pretty good about trying to make data more accessible to everyone on the planet. Again, not very evil.

Unless you refer only to your private data, and again Google is one of the rare companies that doesn't have private data out to anyone. AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. do hand your private data out to other people. When Google makes inroads into their markets, they're actually taking market share away from companies who do try to lock you into proprietary systems and sell your data.

Before you post, please read about how CDNs work

[Dimes]

There have been too many dumb posts...not that that is too unusual...but really its not that hard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network

dimes

Re:all your base... (but not flash)

[AliasMarlowe]

But somehow I have trouble believing that the customer would get nothing out of this. Even if it's only faster delivery to an end user , that is a very real and very tangible thing.

I just ran their test on a page from my web site. The page contains a flash photo presentation with accompanying music (still waiting for a non-Flash-based tool of comparable features and ease of use; nothing even remotely close exists). According to webpagetest.org the original page loaded in 2.4 seconds, while Google's "optimized" version took 21.3 seconds. Neither of them actually loaded the Flash presentation properly. Is this because Google dislikes Flash or is it a problem with webpagetest.org?