Before you start drooling over the thought of Google’s Web Accelerator, you should read this.

In it, they show how Google’s web caching works. Basically, when you go to a site using their product, you essentially cache the page for other who come along to view it with the accelerator as well. Sounds innocuos, right? Wrong!

There are plenty of screen shots taken that have shown how people, logged in to areas with their own accounts, have had their personal areas cached and others landing on those pages would essentially view their pages!!! I wonder if this does something similar to yahoo’s cached pages in their personalization feature to strip or replace ads…I’ll have to remember to test this later. Obviously, these types of pageviews essentially steal traffic away from the originating site since it is obviously being served by Google. Another thing to test later (or I’m interested in hearing from others about their experiences with): does google cache internal (private IP address such as an intranet) pages? Hmmm…talk about stealing industry secrets! Imagine if Ford employees could download this application and make requests to internal pages and get cached pages from internal pages/documents at GM!

Then there’s the problem that this application works by prefething so, if there is a customization or personalization site, for example, it will “click” on those links for you such as “cancel” or “delete” or “save” without “reading” the javascript popup warnings. That’s what this site claims.

Well, I’d like to emphasize that I have not tried downloading the Web Accelerator (nor do I think I want to) so I cannot confirm anything…confirming those accusations is left as an exercise for the reader. Although, I am interested in hearing the experience of any reader of this article who has used the webaccelerator.

Although Google’s Privacy Policy states that “Google collects limited non-personally identifying information” but also states that this tool caches non-https requests and caches the page and its cookies. So, if you log into sites that are using HTTP only, your page will get cached. The do, however, state that they will collect information such as your “browser, etc,” whatever the heck “etc” means.

Additionally, if you type in a domain that doesn’t exist, you get a page that states the host doesn’t exist with a link to google’s search results. (I guess linking showing search results directly on that page would have made them feel more evil…like Verisign and their sitefinder).

First, autolink, and now this?

Well, if you want to stop this from affecting your site, there are already solutions posted elsewhere.

How long until webaccelerator is bundled with other apps?

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