Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
System Requirements
Operating System: Win XP or Win 2000 SP3+
Browser: IE 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+
Availability: For users in North America and Europe (during beta testing phase)
Press Release:
Google Web
Accelerator significantly reduces the time that it takes broadband users to
download and view web pages. The Google Web Accelerator appears as a small
speedometer in the browser chrome with a cumulative "Time saved" indicator.Here's how it works. A user downloads and installs the client and begins
browsing the web as she normally would. In the background, the Google Web
Accelerator employs a number of techniques to speed up the delivery of
content to users.
Looks like some of the Mozilla hires are paying dvidends.
Index 1: googlebot
index 2: google web accelerator
if Page A(index 1)!= Page A(index 2)
then Page A is CLOAKING
then Nuke Page A
now Googlebot can see pages as 'Humans' see. a new era.
Why would Google put this out? How does this help their business? Are they just using this to track browsing habits?
it's called brand building darling. Put out a few cutting edge products with no ads, get known for cool.
Google says:Please don't use any automated query scripts on our website.
Google does:
Implements prefetching of pages through automated processes to everyone else's website.
Classic.
If so then it could be fairly trivial to block it.
deny from 72.14.192.0/20 added to the rest of banned IP's works well ;)
The users are then sent to a page explaining the Google webaccelerator is not allowed on the site. The reason why I banned it? Because as I said earlier it can be used by site rippers/downloaders (and it will be) along with other unscrupulous acts that people use proxies to hide behind. Sometimes I wonder how "out of touch" they can be with the "real" world in which they have built their business on.
Do I think they have the best SE out there? You bet, but these kind of tools when not implemented well cause more grief than good. I would think they would have been a little more in tune with things the way they are.
If so then it could be fairly trivial to block it.deny from 72.14.192.0/20 added to the rest of banned IP's works well ;)
Does this app pre-fetch every link that it sees?
I can't believe Google would do that?
I can't see ISPs being too happy about this, It's a tremendous waste of bandwidth. With Google's massive market share and user base this thing has a serious chance of slowing down the Internet as a whole.
If so, I think we should all make a stand and block this nuisance. If enough of us do it, then Google will see sense.
First auto-link and now this. Soon they'll have a full-scale webmaster revolt on their hands.
I don't think it can be used as any type of general proxy to do any auto site ripping. The best you could do, would be to drive IE as a spider (which is trivial to do at current and has nothing to do with Google).
So before we go down this road of lynching them, lets be sure what the issues and consequences are for us. I don't think we can see those yet and there is a disturbing trend to disinformation and misinformation in this thread. No one has yet detailed how the "prefetch" works and Google is ambiguous about it on their site.
If you currently let Google cache your pages, and Google caches your entire site, someone can already rip most of your site direct from Google cache without you even knowing about it.
As far as this new "Web Accelerator" goes, most of my sites and my customers are ecommerce and if cookies don't work there will be a buttload of screaming about empty carts. I'm tortured with using the knowledge of how to block the Web Accelerator or just tell my customers that "It's a GOOGLE issue with the Web Accelerator not handling cookies properly, sorry - nothing I can do, write GOOGLE and see what they say" and stand back and watch the flames.
A question: did you analyze the ORDER of which the links of a page are pre-fetched? I guess this would say a lot about how google sees a page and the importance of links... first link fetched = most important link on a page?
just another idea :)
P!
This is about bandwidth usage with no direct reimbursement for that usage.
I've never come across anyone that's complained about broadband being too slow for web page viewing!
I can't really see any point in speeding up an already adequately fast connection, especially if it puts a drain on my network's bandwidth as I'm doing it.
I can't see admins of corporate networks being too happy about it either. If they have to go and block this at firewall level and then uninstall each copy from the machines of everyone using it.
incrediBILL, it isn't about the site ripping. We all know there are people ripping regularly through the three engines Caches.
I'm aware of the issue - just thought it might bear pointing out as numerous people mentioned this as a new vehicle for ripping pages.
I'm more concerned with what the visitor will see if I block Google's Web Accelerator that it could negatively impact my traffic if it invokes any secondary action on the part of the visitor.
My site is also dynamic so bandwidth is the LEAST of my problems if Google overloads the CPU it will all come to a screeching halt.
[added thought]
Ah crap, if it's not handling cookies right kiss all that affiliate income away....
[edited by: incrediBILL at 11:59 pm (utc) on May 4, 2005]
I can't imagine how the application could filter out such links, especially if they are masked by a local redirect (e.g. example.com/rd?sponsoredlink1).
Could be expensive for advertisers?
But there's no mention of what the user agent is.
Has anyone here figured it out yet?
I don't want to panic, yet. I just want to know more about this thing before making a decision on banning it or not.
Surfing about 15 bookmarked pages saved me 10 seconds of download time - so what? I have cable (1 meg), I'm paying a monthly fee for being connected 24/7. I have no beef with time consumption.
On the other hand... Some people have cable charged per minute, some people have wireless GSM (mobile) connections. For those people I can see the point of saving on time.
Perhaps this thingy isn't a shortsighted project just for now, but for when we all get Wi-Fi?
On the other hand... Some people have cable charged per minute, some people have wireless GSM (mobile) connections. For those people I can see the point of saving on time.
People payting by the minute will end up being charged more by the minute if enough users start wasting bandwidth by using prefetching.
The ISPs will see their bandwith requirements rising and therefore the costs will rise and that cost will be passed on to the customers in the form of increased charges.
It doesn't matter what pricing structure your ISP uses. there's no getting away from the fact that wasted bandwidth is wasted money somewhere along the line.
"WebGUI has a built in feature to "prevent proxy caching" in the settings. Basically it adds a random string of crap to the end of the URL to make sure that each page load is unique. It basically circumvents the proxy server for everyone and gives you really ugly URLs to boot. Unfortunately you can never trust what proxy rules any given proxy server might use for caching content, so this is the one consistent way that you can guarantee will work. "
After visiting the page and waving the mouse around a bit, it logged clicks on nearly all advertisers' links. Bad news for advertisers like myself.
The ppc companies that offer server-side ppc integration scripts will have to quickly set the new Google IP to generate $0 clicks before publishers get a one-off windfall.
That could prove interesting depending on how it handles things.
But there's no mention of what the user agent is.Has anyone here figured it out yet?
Well, I'm going by Brett's post [webmasterworld.com]...
It seems to use the same user agent as the browser
edit, grr, damn forum software: That link should be to message number 9, not message number 1
[edited by: mrMister at 11:45 pm (utc) on May 4, 2005]
I've slamdunked my website with requests now via this new geek toy. No special search engine user agent pre-fetching, not even a proxy IP - everything looks same old in my stats.
But, when I visit Google, all pre-fetched pages are double underlined, so I know which pages can be seen faster than the other. Perhaps that's a new aspect to the discussion?
Being poor was always expensive. :)
Seems that the Google.com --> Google.co.uk geoip redirect is messed up with the accelerator turned on.
Looks like the accelerator uses a mouseover thing - if you move your mouse over the link, it clicks it immediately to get a 0.3 second head start...
All in all, more harm than good?
