Google have launched a new tool which is designed to increase the speed of a users broadband connection. Called the Google Web Accelerator, the idea is that by using the power of Google's global computer network pages can be made to load faster on a users machine.
The Google Web Accelerator works in a variety of ways in order to increase the speed of a users broadband connection. These include:
• 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.
The Google Web Accelerator does not speed up HTTPS pages, and Google also take pains to point out that it only speeds up web browsing, and not file downloads or media streams.
Of course, this speed up comes with the usual Google privacy caveat. If you use the Google Web Accelerator then all of your web browsing requests go to Google, which means that they know all of your web browsing habits. Of course, it could be argued that your ISP already knows all of your web browsing habits, as does all the spyware and malware that is possibly installed on your machine already, so this Google issue is not really a big deal.
The Google Web Accelerator also does very little for dial-up connections, unlike most other web accelerators out there. It is currently available in beta form (no surprise there then) for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, although other browsers can be used with a little proxy tweaking.
If you're happy with Google knowing your web browsing habits, which to be honest they probably do anyway, then you may want to give this a shot. If you find it to be useful, let us know in our comments section below.