Google’s Web Accelerator: Not Just for Dial-Up Anymore
What’s this? A Web Accelerator from Google? They have everything! At first, I almost bypassed this story on CNetNews.com, since I tend to think of web accelerators as tools for dial-up users only. However, glacing at the story, a quote caught my eye: "As fast as broadband is, it’s still not as fast as it could be," Marissa Mayer said (Google’s director of Web products). "Think of Google as your proxy. In exchange, we’ll try to make the Web faster for you." Cool. So what does Google get from this, you wonder? Google’s belief is if people are surfing faster and using the web more, it will result in more searches at Google…and more searches means more ad clicks. Unfortunatley, the web accelerator is still in beta and the home page says they’ve maxed out the number of users for now. Interestingly, though, the download page is still active.
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I downloaded it. It does work. I amnot sure HOW it works, but I have “saved” an hour and a half in wait times in the three days I have had it installed.
it works by caching all the pages that you visit (some that you haven’t visited yet!) and checking regularly for updates. There are a few bad things about this. I tried it and in one hour of browsing it stored more than 300 MB of cached pages on my hard drive, and if you use BE a lot or just browse different pages frequently, then your HD will take a beat down. Next it puts an unnessicary load on their server. As I believe they have, or will, stop that project, because of privacy issues. Seems to work great, but the truth is that no ones time is so important that they can’t wait .3 seconds for a page to load. Those with a slower dsl connection might like it, but it works on the same principle as Internet Accelerator, althought IA doesn’t cache pages that you haven’t yet visited!