Google’s Web Accelerator Returns

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

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. Source: Google

We Say: Google’s famous for developing new and innovative products to enhance the Web … but this isn’t one of them, at least not yet. It was originally released earlier this year in May (v 0.1), but there were a host of problems with it … though it did (and still does) work as advertised, in terms of speeding up browsing.

When originally released, users reported the Web Accelerator was loading administrative links for editing or deleting content … meaning things were being deleted and changed when they shouldn’t have. Also, members of Web forums who used the tool found themselves loading pages previously cached by other users - meaning they could view that user’s account information and private messages.

There was a way for Webmasters to get around this by using a special HTML tag that essentially blocked the Web Accelerator, but when the latest version (v 0.2) was released the tag didn’t work. Google responded and indicated a bug … but even if this is fixed there are still a lot of issues. This appears to be an exception to most of Google’s releases … for once it’s probably a good idea to wait for this product to reach version 1.0 before trying it.