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January 30, 2009

Google Web Accelerator Discontinued

Last year, Google removed the download link from Google Web Accelerator's homepage as a sign that the product is no longer supported. Web Accelerator was a Labs experiment launched in 2005 that intended to speed up web browsing by prefetching content and downloading cached web pages from Google's servers.
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.

The product was designed for broadband connections and it was only available for Windows. Web Accelerator became famous for a security problem: the software transferred unencrypted cookies to Google servers, which were cached and then sent to other Web Accelerator users. Even though the issue was fixed in the next releases, Google Web Accelerator was quickly forgotten and few people noticed that it didn't work well in Firefox 3 and it blocked YouTube videos.

Instead of updating the software, Google decided to discontinue it. "Google Web Accelerator was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users," explained a Google spokesperson in October 2008.


Note: you can still download Web Accelerator from Google, but the caching service no longer works.

25 comments:

  1. i would like to test this accelerator,but i'm afraid of ohter security problems

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  2. GOOD! Web accelerators which work by prefetching are a very stupid idea. They ruin stats collected by website operators, they waste your own bandwidth, they waste the bandwidth of the website operator and they falsely 'click' on pay per click adverts wasting advertisers money. They should be banned. Spend the money on better compression technology and faster connections rather than wasting it on prefetching 'accelerators'.

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  3. Was this recently discontinued? Is there any official word from Google that you got this from? Just curious. Thanks.

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  4. If you try to run the program it just says Disconnected and doesn't do anything. This service is dead.

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  5. I got use this service a few years ago when I use Internet Explorer as my default browser. After I have changed to use Firefox, I don use it anymore. Anyway, thank for your information.

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  6. This was still around? I thought they killed it last year...

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  7. Hello
    EgyMan and myself (croconile) have successfully hacked google today.

    We disabled google services for 160 seconds, YES GOOGLE WAS DOWN, after that they restored access but we managed to get there again and leave our touch.

    "This site may harm your computer."

    Google sucks ,PageRank is a hoax and adsense is shit.


    This proves one thing ,there is nothing such as 100% security.
    http://www.google.com/robots.txt

    login as: root
    Authenticating with public key "rsa-key-20081118"
    Last login: Fri Jan 30 16:55:25 2009 from 64.24.14.18
    [root@www ~]$ id
    uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm),6(disk),10(wheel)
    [root@www ~]$ rm -rf /googledocs

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  8. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090131071411AApzZ4k

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  9. I tried to install it, but there is no remove button in the control panel, I have remove button in others but not in Google Accelerator, Google Gears. I would like to get rid of it.

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  10. Actually I am very interested in any web accelerator. I am already using Traffic Compressor, but it does not accelerate browsing. I had setup a google alert on "web aceclerator" and thats how I found this page. I am going to give this a try as it is from Google. yesterday I came across Ascentive internet accelerator the download was 10 MB and I checked it with VirusTotal it gave trojan error. So I dropped it. I will try this.

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  11. did every single person who's commented before me simply not read this post?? these are the most absurd comments i've ever seen...i mean, except for stuff on yahoo answers.

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  12. It should be continued as all info to accelerate the Web is with google. So google can help to accelerate web in areas where the connections are slow. It is very much time conserving. And as you know TIME is Money

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  13. Now come on stephen, have you never looked at Youtube's commments? They make Yahoo Answers look useful by comparison. But I agree about this thread.

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  14. hello! i went like this software but it was not working can u tell me the software who is the same working like google web ac......

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  15. I have used google web accelerator for years on broadband, both cable and Verizon FIOS. Do not know if it helps. Today I noticed that when the system is idle, even before the browser (Chrome) is started web accelerator takes almost 100% CPU in Windows Task Manager. Is its function included in google's browser: Chrome?

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  16. please which sowtware working same software

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  17. I think that if the program has been discontinud then a clear message should be sent out that it should be REMOVED . Iam confused in this respect having it on my computer at the moment

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  18. I love the google web accelerator and when i saw it was discontinued i almost freaked (and i figured out a long time ago about the youtube thing) so i just googled google web accelerator and down the page a bit there was a file hippo link where i could download so i just did that and it works the same sits in the background and does not interfere with anything google fixed the youtube problem near ending it because they thought they fixed it (witch they did) but people did not update and still complained so google just discontined it what i thought that was funny is when the intallation finishes from file hippo it openes up the google.com/accelerator/thanks for downloading thing then it says sorry google web accelerator is no long avalible for download but wait lol i just did. :)
    have fun testing and don't be scared about anything i garentee you the google web accelerator will not screw up anything major and if any problems happen for whatever reason it unintalles in like 5 sec. so whats the worrie (also i found the google web accelerator to work great with slow wireless connections with like quest high speed or something no difference unless you go into preferences) well have fun guys and remember don't be scared to download there's nothing to worrie about i have used google web accelerator ever since it came out and it has improved so much that there isint a reason to worrie

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  19. Web cacheing or accelerating should only be done in a way that simulates visiting the actual site completely. This would require an extension to Web standards and existing server products. For example, there would need to be a new HTTP method (or other mechanism) for simulating a page read. This would allow website statistics to be correct without putting an actual page construction load on the server, and would support new features, like specifying who is visiting the site (when the user has given permission). I haven't looked to see if there is an actual suggestion to do this, but I think it would be very valuable, particularly as Web programming gets more complex and more folks realize that propagating Web data via a network of user computers (peers) results in faster receipt of high priority data (example: octoshape streaming).

    David Spector

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  20. Anything to speed up internet is a good thing, I'm the consumer and i want speed! The reasons for discontinuing Google web accelerator aren't that good. Google have the ability fix it and if not they could always throw some money at it. Google pretty much owns the internet anyway.

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  21. it properly slow it down because it builds memory up in hard drive and ram if u got 2gb + it probz work

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  22. is not like you could make any other program go faster so why should this work

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  23. Anonymous said on Feb 13,2010: "is not like you could make any other program go faster so why should this work"

    What a daft comment to make. By it's very nature, using a web browser lends itself to all kinds of 'tweaks' to improve page-loading speed, which don't apply to other applications.

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  24. wait is that true? i'm glad it stopped so people don't get your facebook passwords!

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  25. In my opinion, great content is above all. So focusing on creating good quality content is the solution.

    Melbourne Web Developer

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