Google can Accelerate your Web Browsing

In a twist from the usual type of announcements we are used to getting from Google, they’ve just released Google Web Accelerator. This product is different form the web accelerators you might have tried before–those used the web pages in your cache to speed up web page display. Instead, Google Web Accelerator uses the cache of pages on its servers. Interesting idea. Brilliant idea. They have the most recent copies of just about every web page in the world anyway, why not use it to make your web pages load faster!

Of course, as with every new Google service, this one is in beta. At this time users outside of North America and Europe will not see much improvement with it. Other things to note are that it is designed for broadband connections and will offer little acceleration for dial-up users, it requires Internet Explorer 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+ browsers (other Windows browsers can use it, but need to be configured to run all HTTP connections through a 127.0.0.1:9100 proxy), and it only speeds up web pages, not downloads. Also, for security reasons, it will not speed up encrypted pages (https://).

To install Google Web Accelerator, just go to the download page for a quick download and then click on the downloaded file.

The help page says that it will install a new toolbar. I didn’t see this. In Firefox, it installed into my top toolbar and I didn’t see it anywhere in Internet Explorer. In either case, it installed into my taskbar.

Wherever it is installed, you will see one of the following icons:

• – Running
• – Off for this site
• – Off entirely

Additionally, in a toolbar you will see a phrase saying how many seconds you have saved overall (since you began using it or since you last reset the statistics).

By clicking on the down-arrow to the right of the icon in the toolbar, or right-clicking on the icon in the taskbar, you’ll see menu items that will allow you to get help, set your preferences, see your performance statistics, blog acceleration for the current page, and stop web acceleration completely.

In preferences, you have the following options:

• Internet Connection: By default, Google assumes you’re on home DSL broadband, with a speed between 128K and 1M. If your connection is faster than 1M, click Cable Modem / T1. If your connection is slower than 128K, click Dialup.
• Prefetching Pages: One way that Google Web Accelerator makes web pages load faster is by loading the content of some web pages in advance, even before you click on them (including the top search results on Google). To turn off prefetching, uncheck the Enable Prefetching box. (See our article on Prefetching.)
• Cached Pages: Google Web Accelerator stores (caches) copies of viewed and prefetched pages. If you return to a page, Google Web Accelerator will check for a newer version of the page, unless you turn off this preference.
• Clear Your History: To delete all the web pages stored in your Google Web Accelerator cache, just click the Clear History button.
• Don’t Accelerate These Sites: If a site is not compatible with Google Web Accelerator, or if you don’t want requests for that site sent through Google, you can specify that it not be accelerated.

The usual suspects are already screaming about the privacy implications of Google Web Accelerator. Be prepared for a firestorm of protest in the coming days.

We’ll be covering this service more in the coming days after playing with it more.

Note: I’ve been using this for around 20 minutes and I don’t see any savings yet, not even a second.