Pandia Post No. 26 Part 3

The controversial Google Web Accelerator

Google's continues to innovate at a fast pace. The latest product from the search engine company si the Google Web Accelerator, a browser plug in that speeds up your broad band surfing.

In Google's own words: "Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google's global computer network to make web pages load faster."

Does it work? Apparently. Quite a few users have reported significant increases in download time, indicating that this is a very useful product, indeed.

We are not fully convinced that the increase in speed justifies a product like this. It is made for fast broadband connections. Broad band users do not normally have a problem with downloading regular web pages.

If Google was able to speed up dial up modem connections, that would be another matter. However, that is probably difficult, as old fashioned phone based modems do not allow for the additional compression techniques Google is using.

How they do it

So what does Google do in order to speed up downloads?

In short: they do this by prefetching webpages on two levels:

First: Google saves copies of popular web pages on their own servers. When you ask for a particular pages, Google will give you their own copy of the pages. This will normally be identical to the original, but not always.

If the page has been altered only slightly since yours or Google's last visit, you will get the older version.

This means that if you visit Pandia, your browser will not contact Pandia's server, but fetch the relevant page from Google's server.

Second: The Web Accelerator will also download webpages in your own browser before you ask for the, i.e. the Web Accelerator will save copies of web pages in a special cache folder on your own computer.

It seems that as soon as you have opened a page in your browser, the Web Accelerator will start following the links found on that page (probably only links that you move your cursor over) and download them in the background.

When you ask for a page already downloaded to your computer, that page will load very fast indeed, as the browser does not have to go out on the Internet to find it.

As mentioned above, Google also makes use of file compression to increase download time. If a page has been altered slightly, Google may download the new parts only, and stick to the older version of the file for the rest.

Web page tags

You may use a special tag to encourage Google to prefetch pages you believe your visitors are likely to visit. This is the same tag as used by Mozilla in their Firefox browser.

Add the following snippet of code somewhere in your page's HTML source code:

<link rel="prefetch" href="http://www.yoursite.com/page-to-be-prefetched">

However it is clear that Google will not only prefetch pages indicated by this tag. They may prefetch any page found through a link present on a page visited by a Web Accelerator user.

Google may prefetch any page

Webmasters complain, as this prefetching may burden their servers. After all, Google will fetch pages the user has not asked for. Whether he or she actually will visit these pages is unclear. That he or she will visit all of them is very unlikely.

(Google has not provided a tag that stops the Web Accelerator from prefetching pages. There are ways of preventing Google from prefetching pages, though. We have listed one of them below.)

On the other hand, what Google is doing here is not as radically new as some webmasters tend to believe.

Many internet service providers, including giants like AOL and Tiscali, prefetch and compress pages in order to speed up delivery to their customers (by the use of so-called proxy servers).

Hence when webmasters complain that the Google Web Accelerator will skew up their web statistics, they are probably right.

On the other hand, ISPs and large companies already do this by the use of proxies. In other words: Web statistics software will never give you exact figures, only approximations.

Other problems

Webmasters have reported other problems following from the use of the plug in.

For instance, it seems that it doesn't always work with cookies, which may affect advertising and affiliate links. It can disturb login info and shopping carts, and some users have even found themselves logged in as someone else at online discussion forums.

Moreover, it may try to prefetch pages following from links embedded in adverts. If these advertisers pay per click (as opposed to per sale) they may have to pay for clicks generated by the Web Accelerator.

(Google says that it does not prefetch ads, but we find it hard to believe that Google always can distinguish a regular link from an ad link.)

The Web Accelerator site does not provide sufficient information for webmasters to feel safe, and from a PR perspective the launch of this product has been a disaster.

The lack of information has led to a tremendous amount of speculation in online discussion forums, as webmasters fear for their bandwidth, their privacy and their ad based income.

Google should know by now that any product or feature that gathers personal surfing data is bound to make people suspicious.

We do not believe that Google will use this product to spy on individuals. We are pretty certain though, that they will use the data generated to "spy" on searchers on an aggregated level.

The real reason

One might ask why Google, a search engine and advertising company has decided to launch a product like this. This is after all not a search product.

Google won't tell, of course, but it is a good guess that the company will use the service to map surfer habits.

Google is fighting an ongoing war with the more unscrupulous part of the search engine marketing community, clever hackers that will use any trick in the book (and even some that have not been written down yet) in order to gain higher rankings.

Google needs methods to analyze the quality and relevance of web pages that cannot be easily manipulated. The data generated by the Web Accelerator may be used to ascertain the popularity of a web site, a variable that can be added to the existing search engine algorithm.

Hence Google may use the Web Accelerator (and other products like the toolbar) to improve the quality and relevance of search results. This is a good thing.

But Google must make totally clear to users how it is going to protect their privacy. So far there are to many unknown factors to allay the fears of all surfers.

Requirements

In order to test out the Web Accelerator, you need Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher or Firefox 1.0 or higher for Windows XP or Win 2000 SP3+. The present version is limited to users in North America and Europe.

Mozilla prefetching FAQ
Search Engine Watch: New Google Software Attempts to Speed Up Your Web Browsing Experience
Fantomas: How To Block Google’s Web Accelerator

Go to page 4: Successful Search Engine Copywriting