Google Web Accelerator

Google announced on Wednesday the release of Google Web Accelerator,
beta of course. Basically it’s an Internet accelerator, designed simply
to make your web browsing experience faster. Here’s how it works:

• Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
• Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
• Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
• Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
• Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
• Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

As other have noted
however, the application also makes heavy use of Google’s servers, and
could allow them to collect some pretty interesting aggregate data on
the surfing habits of web users. Is that a good or bad thing? Who
knows. Maybe they’ll figure out a way to tie it into their advertising
network. Or maybe they’ll ignore it completely. At least they don’t
track you specifically.