Google Web Accelator (What it is and How to Block it)

The freshly launched con­tro­ver­sial Google "ser­vice" stores every web page that you hap­pened to look at so that you can retrieve it quickly. Imag­ine the issues, and there are many. Here's how to dis­able it.

Think Google's Autolink and Desk­top Search were pri­vacy prob­lems? Yes­ter­day, Google released per­haps its most con­tro­ver­sial prod­uct ever: The Google Web Accel­er­a­tor. It's a sim­ple prod­uct, one that promises to speed up your inter­net con­nec­tion like many lit­tle appli­ca­tions have in the past. It doesn't seem like much.

Of course, look a lit­tle more care­fully and you might even be impressed. The ideas behind Web Accel­er­a­tor are pretty nice, smart enough to be wor­thy of a Googler's famous 20% time. Google has essen­tially decided to make "an extra copy" of the entire World Wide Web (or at least the HTML and images of it) and let you run it off their own blaz­ing servers.

Dig a lit­tle fur­ther and the pic­ture grows macabre. Google is really offer­ing to replace the web, want­ing every­one to use their copy instead of the pub­lic copy. While the World Wide Web is cur­rently a decen­tral­ized net­work of nation­wide servers, Google wants the whole web to run off its com­put­ers, in one of its anony­mous, non­de­script data cen­ters. Con­sider their now-popular cache gone wild.

Mem­bers at Some­thin­gAw­ful forums had a rude shock, for instance when screen­shots of their logged-in browsers were inad­ver­tently avail­able for oth­ers to enjoy.

Can I block it from my site?

Worry, not there are solu­tions, take a peek but exer­cise discretion:

But wait, there's got to be something!

Before we go stork rav­ing mad, let's think it up. It's kind of hard to believe that Google would let a lit­tle speed util­ity through the gates so any duf­fer and his dog could see what you're up to.

Even though PageR­ank and rel­e­vant search are the coin of the realm, it doesn't make sense to me that Google would release some­thing this con­tro­ver­sial to achieve that.

There's some­thing more to this, a uni­fy­ing the­ory that brings it all together. For instance, take a look at Larry Page's promise, "What we've done for the Web, Google aims to do for tele­vi­sion." I've writ­ten a num­ber of riffs on this, fwiw.

I've gotta con­clude that after the Gmail hys­te­ria, Google could see the GWA firestorm com­ing. GWA must be so strate­gic and cen­tral to Google's future that they pushed for­ward with it in spite of the pub­lic backlash.

I could be wrong, but the stars seem to be align­ing around a push into the liv­ing room with Google TV. Index­ing TV con­tent, talk of a TiVo mar­riage, Cur­rent TV, host­ing video con­tent (not just index­ing it) — and now host­ing the Web close to the user to solve latency and band­width issues.

Google's spend­ing half a bil­lion bucks this year on new capac­ity, more than they've spent in the last two years com­bined — just for search? Google TV seems to be a con­sis­tent uni­fy­ing the­ory that explains why Google's doing things that don't seem to make any sense.

  • The Con­trac­tor

    Inter­est­ing thought to prefetch pages but you do know that this is noth­ing new, I had tools like this in 1997. Besides, I'll hold off until it can han­dle cook­ies well. Any site out there depend­ing on cook­ies for logins, shop­ping, etc is going to have to come up with a way to keep peo­ple from think­ing their site is bro­ken when it's really their browser..

  • msMis­ter

    I don't begrudge Google for cre­at­ing this app. Some of the things com­ing out of their Research Labs have been very impressive.

    How­ever, I feel that they should have put some­thing as poten­tially harm­ful as this through a lot more rigourous test­ing and pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion before let­ting it loose on the Internet.