py9jmas - 5:37 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

Web Accelerator is a caching proxy server. Proxy servers don't look at robots.txt, they proxy requests. They also cache responses to speed up future requests, and to reduce bandwidth use/latency/server load. This is what Squid does. This is what Microsoft web proxy does. This is what AOL's proxies do. Why are you all upset by this? It is nothing new.

# Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.

It's a proxy.

# Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.

It's a caching proxy

# Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.

It's a caching proxy

# Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.

It uses Mozilla's standard prefetching algos

# Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.

It fiddles with your connection settings. Lots of freee/shareware programs have been doing this for years

# Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Wow, it even supports gzip.