The good old boffins at Google Towers have come up with an ingenious way to help you view web pages quicker.
The Google Web Accelerator uses a bunch of nifty techniques to make web pages appear on your screen in less time. The end result is time saved for you!
How Does It Work?
Always a good question. I’ll let the Google boffins explain:
"Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:
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."
Every Second Counts..
After you’ve downloaded and installed the software (which takes a few seconds so Google already OWE you time before you’ve started!) the tool just runs in the background. There’s a little clock icon that appears on your tool bar showing you how much time you’ve saved, it’s a nice gimmick.
For the first couple of hours I used it I saved a whopping 4.7 seconds! This might not sound a lot but use the Internet for 12 hours a day for a year and twelve months from now I’ll have saved 3 hours. Now all I need to do is work out what I’m going to do with all that extra time..
The Down Side..
Two sides to every story etc.. The down side to this tool is that Google uses it to store information about surfing activities so be sure to read the Privacy Statement if you’re a member of the conspiracy theory gang:
"When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests .. It is possible that some personally identifiable information could be sent to Google, if the information is sent without using an encrypted (HTTPS) connection."
The Google Web Accelerator
http://webaccelerator.google.com
