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| Google Web | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Initial release | May 4, 2005 (2005-05-04) |
| Final release | 0.2.70 / January 20, 2008 (2008-01-20) |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
| Website | webaccelerator.google.com |
Google Web Accelerator was aweb accelerator produced byGoogle. It usedclient software installed on the user's computer, as well as datacaching on Google's servers, to speed up page load times by means ofdata compression,prefetching of content, and sharing cached data between users. Thebeta, released on May 4, 2005, works withMozilla Firefox 1.0+ andInternet Explorer 5.5+ onWindows 2000 SP3+,Windows XP,Windows Server 2003,Windows Vista andWindows 7 machines. It was discontinued in October 2008.[1]
It was discovered that Google Web Accelerator had a tendency to preventYouTube videos from playing, instead displaying an error message stating that the video was no longer available.[citation needed]
Google Web Accelerator sent requests for web pages, except for secure web pages (HTTPS), to Google, which logged these requests. Some web pages embedded personal information in these page requests.
Google received and temporarily cachedcookie data that the user's computer sent with webpage requests in order to improve performance.
Google Web Acceleratorcrawled every web page it came across, leading it to inadvertently deleting web pages when it indiscriminatelyprefetched links.[2]
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.[3] 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.[2]
Some privacy experts expressed concern that Google could "combine personal andclickstream data with existing search history data contained in Google's own cookie to create a far-reaching profile" on users.[4]
