Techno-Science

I had recently heard about the Google web accelerator, but it has been unavailable for download for a bit of time. Since it came back available on their website, I decided I would try it out to see what I would be able to get, what kind of speed would it give me. After 1000 pages views, I had saved 24.7 mins (viewing 40.5 accelerated pages would save me a minute). At the moment, I’ve been web accelerating 1098 pages to get 30 minutes saved, which is a pretty good rate: 2.73 % min/page or 36.6 pages/min (this would mean that for each ~37 pages I web accelerated, I get one minute saved.

Rather than your computer relying on the DNS servers provided by your ISP, Google Web Accelerator redirects all domain lookups to Google servers, using Google as your proxy. The theory here seems to be that because Google is already caching a great deal of information about sites into memory on tens of thousands of computers at data centers, why not take advantage of all those lookups while caching your own surfing habits in the process? Copies of pages you look up are cached by Google’s servers, downloading new data if the page has changed since your last viewing. Some additional pages linked to the site are downloaded to your machine in the background to beef up the experience. Compression is also used to further boost speed, although it doesn’t seem to be the image-crippling experience AOL delivered.

The Google Web Accelerator cache is separate from the standard browser cache.

Source:http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/05/24/google_accelerator.html

By the way, a last calculation, (3.3hrs - 2.9 hrs) / 3.3 hrs = 12.1%
This mean that the accelerator saves us approximately 1 tenth of an hour of webbrowsing. 10 minutes of acceleration per hour is a not bad.

But like any accelerator, you won’t feel any difference, there won’t be amazing blazing fast page load speed. Those seconds you save are throught days. I’ve been using the accelerator for about two days, browsing quite a lot (~16 hours of browsing), and yet, it only saved me 25 minutes, or accelerated 3.3 hours to make it 2.9 hours.

What is more interesting to look at is the fact that it only saved me 3.3 hours out of the 16. This mean that the web accelerator speeds only about 20.625% of our daily webbrowsing, 1/5 of what we look at. It may sound small, but it’s rather good for a general web user.

For anyone looking at speeding your webpage processing A LOT, google web accelerator is not for you, but if you’re looking to save you some time (maybe like ~6 hours per years), then you might consider using it. By the way, it’s don’t slow your web navigation (duh!) and even thought 6 hours of a years is small. Also, take into consideration you might not want to break your privacy by using it since it’s been said it DOES store your password and other info to send them to google. I don’t think anyone want to lose his privacy to speed gain.

I’ve also found some informations about the GWA breaking security on some website since people would log onto other users account because they were getting the page loaded from someone elses. You can read more about this on the search engine journal. Don’t forget to also check the news.com (cnet) tech news about GWA.

EDIT: Interesting read from http://fantomaster.com/

The 8 Evils of Google Web Accelerator (GWA)
1. The Google Web Accelerator is a highly invasive piece of data scraping spyware operating a technology that can create a tremendous server time (CPU) and bandwidth load on web sites it happens to hit. Web publishers are not reimbursed by Google for the resulting costs in any way.
2. GWA provides a fast proxy for site rippers.
3. GWA prefetches pages through automated processes – something Google has expressly forbidden others to do with their own site. Many of these will be pages you may not even intend to visit – Google alone decides what’s supposed to be good for you. The redundant consumed bandwidth would again be ours to pay for alone without getting anything in return.
4. It does not obey the generally accepted robots.txt convention which in itself makes it spyware by definition and constitutes a high security risk for all sites hosting sensitive information.
5. GWA generates artificial impressions for paid online ads, thus defrauding advertisers of legitimate traffic. Preventing this from happening is currently within the sole responsibility of webmasters operating sites featuring such ads, in violation of which they are liable to face criminal charges of click fraud and attendant damages claims.
6. GWA gives Google the opportunity to manipulate the raw HTML code of a web site before it is received by the browser – you may not get to see what the site’s publishers meant for you to find there – this again is solely at Google’s discretion. And in case you’re wondering: yes, they have an established track record doing this already with their new AutoLink program. In our view this may constitute a blatant violation of copyright and trademarks.
7. GWA makes all your surfing habits 100% transparent to Google – a corporation whose top executives are known to have the strongest ties (read: security clearances) with government bodies such as the NSA, the world’s largest intelligence agency. Without any accountability setup in place, nobody knows how and against whom this data is or may be used.
8. Google as a media company has an established track record of trying to steal their advertising partner agencies’ high net worth clients from them. Extensive use of GWA will make them privy to any and all cookies furbished by web sites worldwide. This enables them to build an almost comprehensive database of online vendors’ and buyers’ behavior, sales strategies, locations, time factors, etc. Data which, when properly processed, will reveal just about everything relating to real life online commerce and its participating parties.

Finally, Google admits on their own support page that any and all passwords, e-mail addresses etc. you enter in a web form (e. g. when purchasing an item online) will be funneled via their systems.

[Source: Google Web Accelerator support page]

If you haven’t been able to get your hand on a version of it, go to http://webaccelerator.google.com/index.html, be sure to include the .html otherwise you’ll get a page telling you you can’t download it anymore. But remember, consider reading all the previous information before choosing whether or not to download it.