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.
What is their ultimate goal with pre-fetch?
Has anyone considered what reason Google could possibly have for unleashing this pre-fetch menace other than the obvious comments earlier to track site access more closely?
First they announced enabling "Enhanced searching with Firefox":
[webmasterworld.com...]
Now this Web Accellerator release seems designed just to snag the IE crowd for whatever reason they want to be able to shove the technology down everyone's throats and Microsoft IE users were next in line.
Here's the clue on their web site that it's not an optimization technology but a bandwidth hog technology:
Dial-up users may not see much improvement, as Google Web Accelerator is currently optimized to speed up web page loading for broadband connections
Nothing new here, mostly restatement of what's already been covered, that it just doesn't add up to create meaningless technology to solve a problem that doesn't exist [anyone you know perceive broadband slowness as an issue?] and create a bunch of new problems that didn't exist before. Even if your local broadband provider WAS slow due to overloading this will just make it worse, not better.
So WHAT IS THE MOTIVATION of choking the net with more requests and slowing down access to some dynamic sites (now potentially overloaded as you can't cache them and make them work properly) by the very nature of technology designed to make it faster?
There must be more to the story than we're not privvy to at this point as it doesn't pass the sniff test.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 1:51 am (utc) on May 5, 2005]
mrMister, the one thing I'd say is that it's only been on Labs for a few hours, so folks may want to give it a little while before judging it or deciding what they think.
That's a fair enough statement.
I have been quick to jump to conclusions on some of the bandwidth usage issues.
However, I do think that the Webmaster should be given more control over which pages can be accessed by the app, especially during beta testing.
It's just impossible for the programmers to pre-empt every possible problem that could occur on any of the billions of web pages out there.
The webmaster of the site is in a much better position to guage the possible problems that might occur on their site and therefore they should be able to have the final say on whether the caching and prefetching should go ahead or not.
There are a number of problematic issues that I now have to deal with regarding this pre-fetching on some of my sites. None of these would occur if the app obeyed my robots.txt files.
This may be the answer in itself:
>> Now this Web Accellerator release seems designed just to snag the IE crowd for whatever reason.
I would say 'whatever reason' could be to try to stay a step ahead of M, by getting people used to using this technology, before M decides to, for some odd reason, add MSN Search to IE browsers.
Mere speculation on my part.
Justin
[edited by: jd01 at 1:36 am (utc) on May 5, 2005]
6. Will Google Web Accelerator affect traffic for ads on my site?
No. We do not prefetch ads
um, how does google know what an ad is compared to a link?
Why did a Google employee apparently state that Google sends a Google UA for the prefetch when in fact it does not do this? Same sniff test issue here.
A few random questions:
- Are the cached pages the same as those displayed in the serps under the cache link?
- Does the meta noarchive tag have any influence?
- Are all pre-fetch requests still using the special header?
For the program itself:
- is the accelerator cache in a readable state by other programs, ie.
- Is it in text or binary format?
- Can Google Desktop Search read it?
Are the cached pages the same as those displayed in the serps under the cache link?
AH HA!
Now you're pointing to something that could be bordering on a real reason to make the technology compelling that I had completely overlooked. If they are actually combining this pre-fetch technology with the regular search engine indexing technology then pre-fetched pages could theoretically be updated in the SERPs based on user demand to keep their index even more fresh in ... REAL-TIME.
I know I get indexed every 2 nights already so they seem to be getting closer IMO.
Could this possibly be a precursor to live interactive search engines with SERPs updated in real-time?
This MAY pass the sniff test if in fact this is the ultimate goal.
If they are actually combining this pre-fetch technology with the regular search engine indexing technology then pre-fetched pages could theoretically be updated in the SERPs based on user demand to keep their index even more fresh in ... REAL-TIME.
re-arranging 8 billion pages in a database in real time? I don't think even Google have the computing power to do that.
I'd have thought that the toolbar would be enough to be able to fairly accurately calculate the popularity of sites on the Internet.
Alexa seems to do an adequate job of this and I suspect there are less Alexa toolbars in circulaion than Google ones.
If they are actually combining this pre-fetch technology with the regular search engine indexing technology
I believe thats what lexiv said in msg #26. I am not sure if real time would be possible. They dont need real time really.
Anyone else noticed it?
re-arranging 8 billion pages in a database in real time?
Maybe just the index for the keyword you used to get to the site - just a thought.
I believe thats what lexiv said in msg #26. I am not sure if real time would be possible. They dont need real time really.
80 posts later it's hard to remember :)
I wasn't thinking instantaneous exactly, but anything less than a few days would be an improvement.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 3:25 am (utc) on May 5, 2005]
My sites struggle under their load as is. Google requests that we do not send automated queries to them, as it increases their load without monetization and can cause them problems. This is just plain meanspirited to unleash these unrequested requests on us.
Cry foul webmasters, it's not fair for Google to generate unrequested requests to our sites.
C'mon Google, do no evil. My site's speed is limited by load, not data transfer and this application will only contribute to my load.
Give me an easy way to opt out of prefetching please. If you expect people to have the courtesy to respect Google's load issues then don't unleash a DDos on us.
It addresses issues like Page fetching, Advertising, usage, stats etc.
Enjoy.
Email, blog, guestbook and formmail spammers are going to absolutely love it.
Immediately blocked from all the sites on my servers. No need, no way.
Google you are getting carried away with yourselves.
btw, AOL has been using a proxy cache for years and it's the first thing users want to bypass.
Why would any broadband user want a 1%-5% speed improvement?
A. It will make the Google Browser more appealing when it is released!
It impresses me to no end that a company representative would actually take the time to not only read what we have to say, but to offer clarification, suggestions and advice.
Thank You.
Justin
End Off Topic
"Another focus that I know of is on compressing data that goes over the connection."
Now, this is the way to go.
"Prefetching" pages is just plain dumb waste of bandwidth and creates more problems than what it is worth.
A competitive broadband accelator that I use uses Content Sensitive Compression (CSC) to individually compress each element of a web page.
The speed increases on using the competitive accelator on DLS broadband have been averaging 40% (and I'm not even using the maximum compression settings, as they decrease the quality of images too much).
Over GPRS I've achieved 200%-300% speed increase.
What is their ultimate goal with pre-fetch?
not nice thought:
"behaviour targeted ads" -? - i had a conversation with a web marketing exec just yesterday and that side of the industry is saying that looking past "contextual" is "behavioural" - i.e. tracking surfing patterns etc... something others have been doing for awhile...
so targeting ads based on where someone has been and where they might go would give more useful targeting options for advertisers than just showing ads related to what page the surfer is currently on etc...
linking this in to AdWords somehow would produce this sort of option...
nicer thought:
seriously doubt this "behaviour tracking" would be employed by Google... and WebAccelerator is probably just another genuine app to offer users like Picasa...
Enjoy."
There's nothing in there about an easy ability to prevent the automated requests to our sites. Just a well worded attempt to explain it.
Would Google be satisfied if I "addressed" automated queries to them that they found problematic merely by explaining to them what I was doing?
I can see it now....
"I was sending you automated requests. I was doing so to your search pages but did not touch your PPC ads. This can have the effect of increasing load to your servers without the ability for you to monetize the traffic. You can identify my traffic by the header 'X-moz: you are acting discourteously google' but do note that this is a non-standard header that may change*".
*That's no joke. Read the link on their FAQ.
"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.
