Web accelerator

Google’s campaign to infuse itself into the user’s hard disk continues with the launch of a new free product – software designed to improve web page loading times over broadband connections.

Google Web Accelerator works by using a number of techniques including using Google’s servers as a proxy cache. What it won’t do is speed up downloads or make accessing secure servers any faster.

Google Web Accelerator is still in the testing stages and a dedication newsgroup has been established to discuss bugs and suggested improvements. Although designed specifically for broadband connections, and restricted so far to North American and European computers, dial-up users may also notice a slight improvement too.

Privacy is obviously an issue when using a web proxy server supplied by a search engine, so Google are tackling this and other questions on their FAQ page.

Google Web Accelerator can be downloaded for free and requires Win XP or Win 2000 SP3+ and Internet Explorer 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+. Other Windows-based web browsers can use the software by manually configuring proxy settings to 127.0.0.1:9100 for HTTP connections.

Webmaster and content providers should also take a look at Google’s advice on how Web Accelerator affects them and how to manipulate code to enable pre-fetching of links.

Interestingly, in light of rumours that Google are working on a browser of their own, the webmaster FAQ page contains a couple of links to Mozilla, the project behind the Firefox browser, and none to Microsoft, the author of the ubiquitous Internet Explorer.