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Google Web Accelerator

Posted: 2005-05-05 11:11am
by Admiral Valdemar
In case anyone missed it, this has recently been released to help accelerate access speeds online.

http://webaccelerator.google.com/

Doesn't do anything for me behind my proxy, but it should help dial-up a lot more.

Posted: 2005-05-05 11:12am
by General Zod
er. yay? i suppose if you're forced to use dialup it's a good thing, though for those of us on cable i doubt it'll help much.

Posted: 2005-05-05 11:46am
by Executor32
Ahem:
The Google Web Accelerator FAQ wrote:3. Can I use Google Web Accelerator with a dial-up connection?

Dial-up users may not see much improvement, as Google Web Accelerator is currently optimized to speed up web page loading for broadband connections.
That being said, I'm still trying it out anyway. It's bound to be faster than what I currently experience at 24kbps. :D

Posted: 2005-05-05 01:52pm
by Pablo Sanchez
The creator/proprietor of somethingawful.co* has an article up on his frontpage (it's easy to find) about how horrible Google Web Accelerator is. I found it very interesting and, if it is true, informative. If any of our incredibly clever computar geniuses have seen the article, they could say something about it's veracity.

Since I use high-speed connections to surf the internet and victimize people in multiplayer games, I will not be using this service.

Posted: 2005-05-05 02:03pm
by andrewgpaul
I'm failing to see how this is different to your ISP cacheing the sites you visit, myself.

Posted: 2005-05-05 03:37pm
by Faram
Pablo Sanchez wrote:The creator/proprietor of somethingawful.co* has an article up on his frontpage (it's easy to find) about how horrible Google Web Accelerator is. I found it very interesting and, if it is true, informative. If any of our incredibly clever computar geniuses have seen the article, they could say something about it's veracity.

Since I use high-speed connections to surf the internet and victimize people in multiplayer games, I will not be using this service.
I cannot find that on SA, but I would not install it.

It is a proxy service and as sutch it can read any and all information passing to and from you compouter.

Posted: 2005-05-05 03:48pm
by Pablo Sanchez
Faram wrote:I cannot find that on SA, but I would not install it.
Weird. There was a bigass link at the top of their main page a couple hours ago, but now it's gone. As of this posting the article still exists at

www.somethingawful.c om/articles.php?a=2858

Though that might well change.

Posted: 2005-05-05 06:08pm
by Pu-239
Well, it does appear to precache web pages. But eh, it's not worth the trouble and I'm running Linux (BTW also running my own caching DNS server, since the longest part in loading a new site appears to be the lookup (yeah, I know the browser does it too, but I'm already using the DNS server for other purposes anyway)).

Posted: 2005-05-05 06:11pm
by phongn
GA will not cache anything going through HTTPS (usually any transaction involving money, but often e-mail as well). Anything else is fair game, but it remains to be seen if SA's warnings come true. Google probably should check against the usual SID cookies or parameter passing to ensure that they're not sending you information they shouldn't, however.

This has the usual privacy concerns as with Google Mail -- since they can more or less scan everything you insecurely browse they could do quite a bit with said data. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt; they're likely going to use this information to improve their advertisement sales and not do anything else with it.

As for the ISP caching server comment, yes, this is exactly what it does. However, GA goes a step further and determines what data has changed and then only sends the updated data to your client-side application.

Finally, this is primarily intended to help people on broadband; Google has a lot of bandwidth at their disposal and are likely faster than the majority of websites on the 'net.

Posted: 2005-05-08 11:41am
by Buzz
I'd be interested in finding out whether we're going to experience the same problems they have over on the SA boards from people using the google accelerator (mainly being able to view other peoples PM's). *Stuck on Rural dialup, but not going to be using GA anytime soon*

Posted: 2005-05-08 12:47pm
by Dahak
I'm quite happy with my 2 Mbit, and I remember some abysmal experiment with an "acdelerator" in an old company I worked for, so I think I'll let that one pass...