Google Web Accelerator

[Infiniterb]

Check out the google weblog for more info:

http://www.google.com/googleblog/

So far I've said 7.2 seconds of my life.

[nullbit]

Reading the FAQ, it's essentially using low-latency proxies to route all your requests through. This means they have full knowledge of every page you visit, but also any personal data you submit in forms.

Of course nobody has to use it if that concerns them, but still I'd imagine their gonna get a hammering for the privacy issues on this one.

[thebassman]

If it would be pre-caching pages to serve them more quickly, I wonder if that has any effect on indexing...?

[Infiniterb]

Well, if you tie it in with the toolbar, that's constantly querying the pages you visit as well. It's spyware, really, only not in a hindering form peformance wise. Nonetheless, the toolbar is spyware by definition.

[nullbit]

Originally Posted by Infiniterb

Well, if you tie it in with the toolbar, that's constantly querying the pages you visit as well. It's spyware, really, only not in a hindering form peformance wise. Nonetheless, the toolbar is spyware by definition.

Well, that's true, but it's more invasive than that. As an example, if I checked my PMs here at DP the Google toolbar would only know I visited the URL for the PM page, this new service would allow them to actually read my private messages.

[Infiniterb]

There's a filtering mechanism built in as well.

[Jiraiya]

The main purpose and goal is to log user's information. Here's a two comments made over at slashdot and it all makes sense...

Let's look at the information Google currently has to generate search results from.

1. The content of each webpage (text, images, video, anything really)
2. The number of pages that link to a page in question
3. The words that people use to link to a page
4. The sites that people click on after searching for a term

These by themselves generate pretty good results, but sometimes this information can be deceptive. The more metrics you have to measure relevance by, the better.

So now, Google offers to cache the Internet from everyone. What can they get out of this? Well, everyone here is speculating about the evil things, so I'll leave those as a given. What I haven't seen so far is a very valuable piece of information they get from this: web traffic. They get to see how many people go to web sites, what time, where they got referred from, and anything else that can be deciphered from someone's web traffic. Not only can they rank pages by how many people link to a page, they get to see how often each link is actually used to get to the page. That's extremely valuable, because it's hard to fake convincingly. Web sites won't be able to plant links around the Internet to increase their ranking, because if no one actually clicks the link, then it's not important in the first place. That is awesome.

So I basically think it may have something to do with http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/29/1824206&tid=217&tid=99&tid=1 . What better foundation for a TrustRank system can you get, than one where you know how visited sites are? Scam sites would only get sporadic visitors from fooled Internet users and have their PageRank drop like a rock, while news sites, popular gaming sites, and so on, would get large numbers of returning users. Cross-linking scam sites would find out that their exploits wouldn't work very well anymore, and Google could possible tune their rank system to let both PageRank and TrustRank have an influence on the final rank. Sounds like the regular Google philosophy of conquering by improving. And they'd need our browsing habits to pull it off.

[thebassman]

I think that hit the proverbial nail on the head right there.

[Infiniterb]

It could be, who knows. Sounds about right to me.

Btw, I'm at 1.9 minutes saved. I've almost got enough time saved to watch commercials (I normally browse the forums while commercials are on TV).

[thebassman]

I'm surprised it does it 1.9 minutes, instead of 1 minute, 54 seconds or something...

[john_loch]

There's quite a lot to it, if I understand this thread.

Twould be nice to have a realistic alternative to Alexa.
Imagine the possibilities. In terms of strategy, it should have happened a long time ago.

Of course I wouldn't use it if you paid me, I like my privacy bigtime.

Be interesting to see what they make of it..

Cheers,

JL

[Lawsuit]

I have a Yahoo! and Google toolbars, do they read my credit card when I enter it?

Thanks!

[Infiniterb]

Originally Posted by thebassman

I'm surprised it does it 1.9 minutes, instead of 1 minute, 54 seconds or something...

Touche`

Btw, 2.5 minutes saved. Or for you Mr.Bassman, 2:30.

I wonder what I'm going to do with all this time saved!

[thebassman]

Well, first bug found... it majorly screws up cookies on phpbb forums... in addition, people are reporting it caching people's login's... giving people access to admin features because access to those geatures were cached on google's end... not good.

[crazyhorse]

Originally Posted by thebassman

Well, first bug found... it majorly screws up cookies on phpbb forums... in addition, people are reporting it caching people's login's... giving people access to admin features because access to those geatures were cached on google's end... not good.

Sounds familiar - stack overflow at line 63 Edit - cant figure out if that has to do something with the web accelerator.

[thebassman]

I've uninstalled it... seem to be a lot of bugs so far.

[Infiniterb]

TBM,

Is that bug on just phpbb forums?

[tlainevool]

Originally Posted by thebassman

people are reporting it caching people's login's... giving people access to admin features

Yikes! That really scares me. Where are people reporting this? If this is true I hope Google fixes this vey quickly. I'm not going to use this thing until I hear some more about it.

[Dio]

MOre info on some problems with it here: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/06...lerator_i.html

Google Accelerator wreaks havoc on Web-apps by "clicking every link" on every control screen in order to cache it -- so it also ends up clicking on "Delete my account" and "Launch pre-emptive nuclear strike," etc.

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they've already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here's the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page -- including links like "delete this" or "cancel that." And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a "Are you sure you want to delete this?" Javascript confirmation behind that "delete" link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway.

There's some foo you can add to your Web-app designs to prevent this, but if you haven't patched and your users are using the accelerator, look out!

[quattro]

From what I've seen so far I wouldnt be surprised if site admins begin blocking the google accelerator IPs.