Several Sites Expressing Concern About Google Web Accelerator

Recently I mentioned a new offering from Google called Google Web Accelerator. (Hereafter referred to as GWA.) The idea behind it is that it can speed up your surfing by "pre-fetching" pages before you click on 'em. And when you do click on 'em -- hey presto, the page is already loaded.

But many sites are expressing concern about the GWA, both because of privacy issues and because the software is causing some severe problems on certain sites.

A really good overview article to start with is from Pandia. It's at http://www.pandia.com/post/026-3.html . It discusses how Accelerator works and the variety of problems that it might cause, from prefetching pages that Webmasters don't want prefetched, to accidentally prefetching ads, which would put a burden on advertisers who are paying-per-click, to messing up shopping carts and discussion forum logins.

CNET has an article at http://news.com.com/2102-1032_3-5698447.html?tag=st.util.print which includes quotes from a Google spokesperson and privacy advocate Richard Smith. The question as to what Google will be doing with the clickstreams generated by the accelerator came up, in addition to how that stream will be tied in with regular Google cookies. Google's Marissa Mayer said, "To date, we're not doing anything with this data in terms of market research. We have no plans, but should that change we would aggressively notify our users and give them some escape hatch."

Escape hatch? Uh..

While an article at Betanews doesn't provide many more technical details, it does have some pointers to instances where the Accelerator broke a site, and the comments make for interesting reading as users share where the program broke for them (or broke for other people; one commenter claims the accelerator let them into somebody else's Hotmail account.)

Speaking of comments, a blog entry at 37signals.com has racked up over 130 of them. The blog entry itself provides a couple of technical solutions for Webmasters who want to avoid the GWA altogether, and the comments are an interesting (though fairly technical) discussion of what the GWA does and doesn't do, how to avoid it, best practices for designing Web services, etc.

For more pointers on how to avoid the GWA, visit InsideGoogle, which has both screenshots of broken sites and a pretty strenuous way to avoid the GWA (block an IP range!) This article had a very disturbing couple of sentences for me: "The hidden benefit is that sites which allow usage of the Accelerator will likely get a boost in Google rankings relative to sites that do not. Google will have deeper usage data for those sites, data which can be used to determine that site's rankings."

Of course, this may all be beside the point. Google Blogoscoped reports ( http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-05-08-n20.html ) that you can't download the GWA anymore. Visiting http://webaccelerator.google.com/ gave me the message "Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support." While his blog entry notes that the download page for the GWA is still up, I got an error message when I visited http://webaccelerator.google.com/dc.html ; "The requested URL was not found on this server."

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