Google Web Accelerator: seeing the Web through the Eyes of Google

Google Web Accelerator, The latest Beta Service from Google Labs is a web accelerator software that’s designed to make surfing the internet faster, but take note that it’s useful only for broadband users and not for Dial-up users (like me ), but don’t get upset that Google left Dial-up people with nothing, because the problem (bottleneck) is in our slow connection not the web, and they can do nothing about that.
Google Web Accelerator is a client software that comes with a plug-in that will be installed on your computer; it’s available for Windows users only and it works on both IE and Firefox (good move from Google).


How it works:
This service will accelerate your web browsing using different means such as:
- 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.
- Parallel downloading: Download multiple parts of the page (images for example) at the same time.

But beware there’s also some privacy concerns along with this service, because when you use it Google will have information on you similar to your ISP and that’s a lot of info if you know what I mean, for example:
- Google will have all the URLs you visit along with the time of the Request, your IP address and information about your computer and connection
- All the information you enter in web forms will go through Google
- Google will temporarily cache cookies that as some of you know might contain valuble information (Username, Passwords, Account information, …)
- Google Web Accelerator will store caches of websites you frequently visit on your system in addition to prefetched pages that you did not visit, and it has nothing to do with your browser’s cache.

But Google promises to never rent or sell a user's personal information to third parties without a user's explicit permission, so hopefully your personal information will be safe, I wouldn’t worry about this if I were to use it, but there’s some paranoid people out there.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about my speculation of Google’s purpose in introducing this service in particular and Google’s recent moves and other services in general, stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Google - Web - Internet - Privacy - Accelerator