Google Web Accelerator Beta

Google as always has sprung another surprisingly nifty utility for its users and fans around the world. The latest in the line of Google Utilities is the Google Web Accelerator, which the company has for now released in a beta version.

As per the Google Web Accelerator website:
Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.

Some of the steps the application takes to speed up the connection are:
Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

We at TechWhack gave this application a test drive on our DSL line but were unimpressed by it. Most of the time it just appeared to slow down the loading time of the webpages. People have even reported privacy issues after using this tool for a couple of hours. A user on a forum reported that he found himself logged in as another user on the forum. This is perhaps due to the application using someone else’s cache file from the Google’s server. Google has not clarified on such issues yet.

Overall, it depends upon personal experience. We turned it off after testing for a couple of hours. Maybe with the user feedback, Google would improve it to have better security aspects and results, which are actually noticeable. Check out Google Web Accelerator Beta