Google Web Accelerator

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2005-05-05 11:11am

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.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2005-05-05 11:12am

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.

Executor32 · Post by **Executor32** » 2005-05-05 11:46am

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.

Pablo Sanchez · Post by **Pablo Sanchez** » 2005-05-05 01:52pm

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.

andrewgpaul · Post by **andrewgpaul** » 2005-05-05 02:03pm

I'm failing to see how this is different to your ISP cacheing the sites you visit, myself.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-05-05 03:37pm

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.

Pablo Sanchez · Post by **Pablo Sanchez** » 2005-05-05 03:48pm

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.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2005-05-05 06:08pm

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)).

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-05-05 06:11pm

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.

Buzz · Post by **Buzz** » 2005-05-08 11:41am

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*

Dahak · Post by **Dahak** » 2005-05-08 12:47pm

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...