Google Web Accelerator was a

web accelerator A web accelerator is a proxy server that reduces website access time. They can be a self-contained hardware appliance or installable software. Web accelerators may be installed on the client computer or mobile device, on Internet service provider ...

produced by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. It used

client software is a computer that gets information from another computer called server in the context of client–server model of computer networks. The server is often (but not always) on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service ...

installed on the user's computer, as well as data caching on Google's servers, to speed up page load times by means of

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...

, prefetching of content, and sharing cached data between users. The

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represe ...

, released on May 4, 2005, works with

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

1.0+ and

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

5.5+ on

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RT ...

SP3+,

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003, codenamed "Whistler Server", is the sixth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft and the first server version to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It is part of the Windows NT ...

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

and

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

machines. It was discontinued in October 2008.

Bugs and privacy issues

It was discovered that Google Web Accelerator had a tendency to prevent

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

videos from playing, instead displaying an error message stating that the video was no longer available. Google Web Accelerator sent requests for web pages, except for secure web pages (

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protoc ...

), to Google, which logged these requests. Some web pages embedded personal information in these page requests. Google received and temporarily cached

cookie A cookie is a sweet biscuit with high sugar and fat content. Cookie dough is softer than that used for other types of biscuit, and they are cooked longer at lower temperatures. The dough typically contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of ...

data that the user's computer sent with webpage requests in order to improve performance. Google Web Accelerator crawled every web page it came across, leading it to inadvertently deleting web pages when it indiscriminately prefetched links. In order to speed up delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator sometimes retrieved webpage content that the user did not request and stored it in the Google Web Accelerator cache. Cached versions of web pages that were created when one user was logged in were sometimes served to other users, allowing them to see private account information. Some privacy experts expressed concern that Google could "combine personal and clickstream data with existing search history data contained in Google's own cookie to create a far-reaching profile" on users.

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google or Google.com) is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the World Wide Web, Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze an ...

Opera Turbo The history of the Opera (web browser), Opera web browser began in 1994 when it was started as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995, the project branched out into a separate company named Opera ...

References

{{Google LLC

Web Accelerator A web accelerator is a proxy server that reduces website access time. They can be a self-contained hardware appliance or installable software. Web accelerators may be installed on the client computer or mobile device, on Internet service provider ...

Web accelerators

Bugs and privacy issues

Related

References