Google Web Accelerator was a

web accelerator A web accelerator is a proxy server that reduces website access time. They can be a self-contained hardware appliance or installable software. Web accelerators may be installed on the client computer or mobile device, on ISP servers, on the serve ...

produced by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. It used

client software In computing, a client is a piece of computer hardware or software that accesses a service made available by a server as part of the client–server model of computer networks. The server is often (but not always) on another computer system, ...

installed on the user's computer, as well as data caching on Google's servers, to speed up page load times by means of

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...

prefetching Prefetching in computer science is a technique for speeding up fetch operations by beginning a fetch operation whose result is expected to be needed soon. Usually this is before it is ''known'' to be needed, so there is a risk of wasting time by p ...

of content, and sharing cached data between users. The

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

, released on May 4, 2005, works with

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current an ...

1.0+ and

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems (in ...

5.5+ on

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was offici ...

SP3+,

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, 2 ...

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

machines.

Bugs and privacy issues

It was discovered that Google Web Accelerator had a tendency to prevent

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

videos from playing, with the message in the YouTube video player, "We're sorry, this video is no longer available." By turning off Google Web Accelerator, the user was able to play YouTube videos again without a problem. Google Web Accelerator sent requests for web pages, except for secure web pages (

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is used for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is enc ...

), to Google, which logged these requests. Some web pages embedded personal information in these page requests. Google received and temporarily cached cookie data that your computer sent with webpage requests in order to improve performance. Google crawled every web page it came across leading it to inadvertently deleting web pages. In order to speed up delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator sometimes retrieved webpage content that the user did not request, and stored it in the Google Web Accelerator cache. Some law experts and IT authors affirmed that Google would "combine personal and clickstream data with existing search history data contained in Google's own

cookie A cookie is a baked or cooked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, nu ...

" Google Web Accelerator is no longer available for, or supported by, Google . the Google Web Accelerator is not compatible with Firefox 3.0. Google Web Accelerator is still available for download from other websites. The Labs experiment launched in 2005 was discontinued and no longer supported by Google, since January 2009.

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the List of most visited websites, most-visi ...

* Opera Turbo

References

{{Google Inc.

Web Accelerator A web accelerator is a proxy server that reduces website access time. They can be a self-contained hardware appliance or installable software. Web accelerators may be installed on the client computer or mobile device, on ISP servers, on the serve ...

Web accelerators

Bugs and privacy issues

Related

References