Google Web Accelerator

Posted in Links for Bedtime by Elliott Back on May 7th, 2005.

Google Web Accelerator is totally broken?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 7th, 2005 at 4:20 am and is tagged with web accelerator, google, accelerator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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The Ghost of PT Barnum 2 years ago 1 point
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Giggling Madly Here - PT Barnum Would Have Been So Proud!

This is a great program for those users who don't know anything at all regarding how computers and/or the internet actually works, and who just want to experience the "feel good illusion" of (not really) increased speed by having this entirely useless acceleration program on their hard drive.

I always laugh out loud whenever anyone proudly exclaims: "The program 'says' I saved 6.9 hours, so I'm very satisfied!" Big deal; the program could also say: "You're now twice as good-looking" or perhaps even "Congratulations youre a millionaire!" Without being able to verify any programs' "claims" (or better put: assertions) it is just that: A totally unverifiable assertion!

Still you've got to admire Google's chutzpa here! I'm guessing that it has to be the most hilarious bit of shell-game spyware ever invented by any company in the entire history of computer or Internet use and development.

Very clever really, when you consider that the trade off is that users "think" they're getting "increased" internet speed; in exchange for revealing exact the name of every single webpage that you ever visit from the moment that you install Google Web Accelerator until (hopefully) the moment you wise up and remove it.

After Google Web Accelerator is installed it does absolutely nothing to improve browsing. Also Google Web Accelerator collects copies of web pages, (including prefetched pages that you did not even visit), in the Google Web Accelerator cache on your computer.

All this does in effect; is collect and store a gazillion MB of temp files every time you use it for a session of surfing. Try using something like CCleaner after running Google Web Accelerator and browsing the internet for a few hours and see the results for yourself!

And Google gets to know the exact the name of every single webpage that you ever visit for products, news, banking, whatever! This is very valuable information to have; not only does Google know everything you click on, but you get absolutely nothing in return for this info.

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. If you enter personally identifiable information (such as an email address) onto a form on an unencrypted web page, the sites will send this information through Google.

Had he lived long enough to see this, P.T. Barnum; the person who coined the phrase: "A Sucker is Born Every Minute" would most certainly consider those who download, install and leave this program on their computers to be suckers indeed!

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Jeffrey 1 year ago 1 point
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I believe that it does speed up browsing a tad.
prefetching is pretty much the only way to accelerate browsing, and google does it pretty well... its not the overall time saved that i care about, in fact i could care less... if you checked back every week you would waste as much time reading your info as you saved that week, if not more. no, its not the overall time, but the sense of speed you get from page to page. in the old days with dial-up, waiting didnt seem like such a big deal... because we all expected to wait. with broadband, browsing speed now strikes that annoying mid-point where its not quite slow enough to acclimate people to waiting for their pages to load, but its also not quite fast enough to provide the instantaneous page-to-page surfing that people expect, and google web accelerator helps come closer to it... you can feel a small difference, ever so slight, and thats what its really about.

and as for the securities issues... in using the internet we put our security at risk constantly, and personally i cant think of a better company to place my trust in than google. google is perhaps the greatest rags-to-riches internet company ever, and for good reason, too. Googles positive stance in the net neutrality issue only solidifies my trust in the company and my need to support them. im afraid your review boils down to little more than a teched-out conspiracy theory...

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