lasko - 8:07 am on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

Have installed and un-installed

"As a User"

I have to say I was very impressed, all pages were loading faster and smoothly.

My first visit to WW after installation required me to log in and my surfing IP address was Googles IP address.

Although I was highly impressed with the results I had to un-install simply because of 'Privacy'.

The idea of sending uncrypted data, cookies and form submissions through Google won't help my 7 hours of sleep at night.

This is a great tool but saving a few seconds for the price of privacy is just not worth it.

It's not spyware due to the option of uninstalling; however I feel uneasy about potential attacks google may come under, plus the serving of ads based on the data I send to Google.

I prefer my ISP saving 3 months of my surfing habbits then Google caching every bit of data for an unknown period?

"As a webmaster"

I'll monitor the effects this may have but at this moment in time I'm not taking any action until we see more clear evidence of bandwidth abuse.

It will help google find our sites and index the content that is for sure, but if this tool grows to be popular we can't just block the IP due to the site being potentially un-available to the users.

So in the end we may well be forced to allow the users to surf our pages with the tool.

Overall:

Another great tool from the labs and I'm very impressed, however their is a BUT! A users privacy is the price, thats the price of free software and I won't use it for this reason.