Google Web Accelerator 798
Lukey Boy writes "Google has released a free web accelerator product for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. According to their information page the software uses Google servers as a proxy for web content, delivering the pages to your system more rapidly and compressing them beforehand."
Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
First, they collect your search information. Next they collected your email. Now they collect your destination. You put it all together, that is quite a bit of information.
What is next?
Very Smart..Very Scary...
Tinfoil, Post!
Google turns Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
So once google owns the entire internet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I'm anti-google. But it's amazing all the things they've gotten themselves into. Now they're apparently going to cache (pieces of) the internet for us.
Though this might finally be a usefull tool to get around the
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:isn't this basically a proxy? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that your Usenet posts [google.com], where you're going or where you live [google.com], what you're buying [google.com], what kind of news you're interested in [google.com], and maybe even who your friends are [orkut.com].
But all that's only true if you give them the information. Even so, the quantity that Google could know about me just given all the Google stuff I've used from one single IP address is rather alarming.
But I don't mind. This is partly because I don't think they're jerks (as far as public corporations go, anyway), but mostly still because I don't think they really care.
If we had a lot of evidence they did care, then I suspect that there would immediately exist a movement for 'free', anonymous versions of whatever services Google currently provides.
Sounds interesting.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I the only one a little shocked at this? What's to stop another company from swooping in and buying Google with all your assorted information? Or, to stop Google itself from using this information in a way that most people wouldn't want them to?
Obligatory Murphy's Law derivative quote: "If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something."
do no evil! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Don't worry. Their motto is 'do no evil', so we can trust them!", say the geek masses.
Dow Chemical's motto is "Living. Improved Daily". Unless you're one of 15,000-30,000 people in Bhopal, India [wikipedia.org], of course.
Ford's motto is "Ford: Quality is #1". Well, except for the Ford Pinto (or its modern equivalent, the Ford Crown Victoria, which is burning police to death left+right). Or Ford Explorers, where management ignored engineering reports saying the roof pillars were substantially weaker. Or ignition switches in millions of Ford vehicles which would catch fire- even if you weren't using the car? Then there's the Ford Focus, which I think is close to setting the world record on factory recalls...
Then there's GE- "we bring good things to life". Well, I don't think the people who have been harmed by dioxin poisoning would agree with you there. But hey, GE will sell you a nice water filtration system (seriously- go into Home Depot, GE is the featured brand. Note how it brags about removing industrial toxins?)
Microsoft says "enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential", something I think we can all give a good chortle about, considering how grossly unreliable virtually every Windows release has been, how incompatible their software is one year to the next, piss-poor interoperability, anticompetitive practices, licensing costs, spyware, viruses, etc.
Need I go on to prove that corporate PR lines are just that- nothing more than PR lines? Or should I mention that Google AdSense terms prohibited AdSense customers from discussing, in public or private, their experience/satisfaction with AdSense? Hmm. Now, why would a "do no evil" corporation do something like that?
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
"
I apologize, but I think that you are being naive.
Perhaps they are not 'jerks' but they do care. Every thing that they log is information. Knowledge is Power.
Just my thoughts.
Re:isn't this basically a proxy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, draw another circle inside that one, almost exactly the same size, but not quite. These are the F/OSS zealots who won't install anything unless it's GNU licenced.
The area between the boundaries of those two circles are the only people who would install it. And I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure the other guy in that part of the chart understands that.
Re:Is this like... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is a great way to make sure popular pages are fresh in the search engine index.
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if there is a god (I prefer to believe in the provable) but the fact that I can cope with a possible god knowing everything about me doesn't mean I like it. Theres not a hell of a lot we can do about a possible god, google on the other hand...
Re:do no evil! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think if Google actually wanted to adhere to "Do No Evil", they wouldn't be gone public with their IPO.
Public companies do whatever they can to maximize profits, I've even read (although I believe this was on
There is also a long ways between "Do No Evil", and "Do Good Things".
On a side note, I use both gmail and google, I remember the pre-google days when searching was just painful. I hope that google will not start to do things the way most of the corporate world does.
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. There are lots of cool things they could do with the information, used in aggregate. They could recommend websites to you by correlating your browsing history with others, kind of the same way Amazon.com recommends products. I for one think that would be cool.
This Has Little To Do With Web Acceleration... (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, running the web accelerator allows google to have compressed copies of all their pre-generated search pages and use the proprietary webaccelerator internals to give them a strategic advantage over web publishers/services/searches- Imagine the benefits this could have on their internal server load if adopted by 90% of web suers...
In typical Google fashion, a very clever move!
No Linux support either (Score:5, Insightful)
Improved Page Rank (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
But what I also trust is that they will open their doors and computers very wide to the first FBI agent with a supboena, especially with the full weight of The [i-newswire.com] Patriot [wikipedia.org] Act. [slashdot.org]
Judges are handing wiretapping orders out like confetti, [slashdot.org] so you need to consider that any information held by any company belongs to the government at any time. All your base belong to us. And what's even scarier is that no-one is allowed to talk about it - all requests for info come with gag orders.
I'd be willing to bet that Google have already been approached for information.
What i'd like to know is what sort of data mining expertise the FBI is gathering in preparation for getting their hands on all googles files.
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
- The content of each webpage (text, images, video, anything really)
- The number of pages that link to a page in question
- The words that people use to link to a page
- The sites that people click on after searching for a term
These by themselves generate pretty good results, but sometimes this information can be deceptive. The more metrics you have to measure relevance by, the better.So now, Google offers to cache the Internet from everyone. What can they get out of this? Well, everyone here is speculating about the evil things, so I'll leave those as a given. What I haven't seen so far is a very valuable piece of information they get from this: web traffic. They get to see how many people go to web sites, what time, where they got referred from, and anything else that can be deciphered from someone's web traffic. Not only can they rank pages by how many people link to a page, they get to see how often each link is actually used to get to the page. That's extremely valuable, because it's hard to fake convincingly. Web sites won't be able to plant links around the Internet to increase their ranking, because if no one actually clicks the link, then it's not important in the first place. That is awesome.
Why didn't I think of that?
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
They want to know what everyone is searching for in a given moment, and model their advertising business around that information. This is the purpose behind Gmail and Google Groups.
This is their business model. They are an Ad business first, and a search engine second.
They will gain information from your personal browsing records. Their advertising business can use this information with direct-market advertisements, future trend prediction, etc.
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, money? Yes, in the end of course they need to profit from it. Google is not charity organization, and have a ton of expenses. However,money how? is a more interesting question.
I can't believe Google will simply sell the results to some third party -- that would look pretty bad PR-wise, and Google has so far tried to avoid these things as well as possible. Something more commonly seen with Google is beating the competition by providing good and accurate search services. If they do that, they gain a larger market share since they're simply better, and that will make companies willing to pay more for AdWords. Tadaa, Google in a nutshell, and how they've always worked.
So I basically think it may have something to do with this [slashdot.org]. What better foundation for a TrustRank system can you get, than one where you know how visited sites are? Scam sites would only get sporadic visitors from fooled Internet users and have their PageRank drop like a rock, while news sites, popular gaming sites, and so on, would get large numbers of returning users. Cross-linking scam sites would find out that their exploits wouldn't work very well anymore, and Google could possible tune their rank system to let both PageRank and TrustRank have an influence on the final rank. Sounds like the regular Google philosophy of conquering by improving. And they'd need our browsing habits to pull it off.
Re:No Linux support either (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting. But wise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Msr. Francois in France browses a Nazi site and Google happily provides the content to him via the handy web accelerator. Can the French go after Google now? (as if they're not already).
Chinese government demands that Google strip out offensive content and replace any references to Li Hongzhi [google.com] with "<insert insult here>". Will Google comply? Has such a demand been made before [detnews.com] ?
Plus, what about copyrights and such? Will Google be held liable for pushing out outdated pages? How will the servers (from where Google is grabbing pages) get their statistics? And since Google will be sort-of screen-scraping, why does Google object to it themselves?
Just some questions that come to mind.
Re:correct (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what I mean. Thousands of pages with nothing but keywords, some random readable text, and links to pages whose ranking they want to pump. These have become sofisticated enough that you can't tell them apart from real web pages just by looking at their linking patterns.
So what's the difference? Real pages are actually visited by people while spam pages aren't. You can use aggregated browsing data to set apart useful from non-useful pages.
Add this to Trust Rank and you got a winner. All you need is a very large amount of bandwidth.
Re:What does Google gain from this? (Score:1, Insightful)
- Improving search results by giving preference to popular web pages (as in most visited).
- Improving search results by ignoring spam-pages identified by simply looking for well-linked pages that nobody visits.
Re:Exactly. (Score:2, Insightful)
Such as censoring their search results at the behest of the chinese government? Licking the boot of a dictatorship just to avoid getting kicked out of the market is not "maintaining the highest ethical standards."
Re:So once google owns the entire internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens when a site changes their content to something GOOG (or their sponsors) don't like and they conveniently forget to update their cached version?
It would be a little like the MiniTruth*, wouldn't it?
I fear for the freedom of information in the digital age, bits and bytes are a lot easier than print to manipulate.
* 1984, George Orwell: The Ministry of Truth, the government department responsible for adjusting historical documents and books to conform to today's version of history.
Re:SPEED UP YOUR INTENET BY 500% (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup...and they all got found out. So you can bether ass that if google did, we'll find out too. And then google and it's adwords/sense is history.
But why would google commit suicide like that? I'm betting they won't, you're saying they are and have. I say show me proof, or pipe down. And if nothing fishy has been detected within, oh, say two weeks?, I'm gonna keep on assuming Google's OK and that you're wrong.
Re:Smart. Scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exactly. (Score:2, Insightful)
Just a personal thought, but if they ever would care to publish their proxy statistics I would be VERY interested - here's an occasion to see first-hand statistics of what people are really looking at. Hell, they could even start a sort of virtual "top of the pops" page...
Re:No Linux support either (Score:2, Insightful)
It's (partially, at least) a local HTTP proxy. Which means some sort of a binary (much like the desktop search stuff), and thus platform specific.
This also means it should work at least somewhat with other browsers (like Opera), you probably just won't be access the config screen easily. If you find the right page to access though you probably can.
Re:No thanks! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly. (Score:1, Insightful)
This is the normal way some people do business. I can't say if Google is one of these people or not, but you can see it clearest on eBay. The most successful crooks play fair for a long time and then go crooked and flee with huge sums of money.
To capitalism, people's trust has value. The next step is to figure out how to make as much money for your shareholders out of that trust. Go free market!
BTW, Google admits they will log every URL.
Re:Exactly. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which makes me wonder:
...My company's firewall filters some objectionable content
...My company's firewall does not filter Google
...would I (or others) be able to surf for objectionable content through Google and bypass the company firewall this way?
I don't own a tin foil hat... but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Website visits
Emails
Web Searches
Photos
Hard Disk Drive contents
Hard Disk Drive searches
Just the aggregation of this data on people who use all of their services could make their current income seam like pennies. This is the type of think that governments like a lot, not just large corporations. I know they have a "don't be evil" pholosophy (their words) but shit, even Skynet was nice at one point.
Re:do no evil! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure I won't, but I am still annoyed I can't! (Score:2, Insightful)
Puts on Tinfoil Hat... (Score:5, Insightful)
So far at least, Google has arguably successfully Done No Evil - they've offered a great search site, extended their great search system to the desktop, embedded it into browsers for convenience, offered webmail with unprecedented storage space and lovely features, and even revitalised the online advertising industry away from obnoxious graphical banners and popups towards relevant, discrete and unobtrusive text ads.
However, against this background of saintly behaviour, the potential for great evil lurks. Take the Google Search cookie not expiring until 2038 - there is no reason whatsoever for this, apart from to make it easy to track your searching habits. Of course, they could just do this by aggregating all queries that hit their servers, but that wouldn't uniquely identify you down to your specific machine, would it?
Take GMail - it's a lovely idea, and a lovely system, but it does mean that (theoretically), Google now has unfettered access to your entire inbox, and all the personal information therein. They also make a big deal of how you "never have to delete anything ever again" - handy for users maybe, but definitely handy if you're interested in data-mining vast volumes of personal information.
Google Desktop Search is a lovely tool (and very handy), but it does have an annoying (and downplayed) habit (IIRC) of by default echoing any local searches you make to Google, so it can return lists of "web" and "desktop" matches. Not such a big deal, unless you're searching your local machine for, oh, I dunno... company credit card details? Passwords? Rarely-used logins? Where you left the downloaded "Hot XXX teen sluts.mpeg"? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Now look at the Google Web Accelerator - not only your searches, but now every single page you visit (and even some you don't - are these differentiated between?) passes through Google's systems. Fair play to them for excluding HTTPS requests, but in all fairness they couldn't ever have got away with caching those as well anyway.
At this point, (assuming you use Google and don't take regular tinfoil-hat precautions like clearing cookies/deleting old mail/never searching your local machine for anything private/etc), Google potentially has access to:
Hmmm.
I have to stress here that I severely doubt there's any kind of deliberate conspiracy going on. For my money this is just a case of a bunch of overenthusiastic geeks with access to a huge database to mine, who are too busy having fun to write privacy policies because "we'd never do anything bad anyway, and people know that".
However, this still doesn't mean that it's a good thing - power corrupts, and Google now has one hell of a lot of power. Even if Larry, Serge et al stay true to their vision, Google's a public company now - it only takes the board to fire L&S and replace them with a marketing puppet and all of a sudden your trust in Google isn't worth shit - they hold all the cards, and they've got your entire life written on them.
In addition, this getting carried away with where they're going, and not listening to user-opinion is exactly the kind of attitude that is most publicly (and damagingly) exhibited by Microsoft. It's a small step from not taking five minutes to assuage people's concerns to not taking five seconds to even consider them. Both attitudes exhibit a certain "I know better than you" arrogance, one which tends to only get worse with time, and the more people start complaining about it, the worse it tends to get.
As I said, I severely doubt Google
onspeed (Score:1, Insightful)
This one was a Google interview question (Score:3, Insightful)
In the interview I was in the question was framed to address the problem of serving Google content to developing countries and other places with poor network connectivity. I wonder, if the purpose of the web accelerator is to make Google more accessible in those kind of environments than their (graphics-heavy) competitors.
Re:No Linux support either (Score:2, Insightful)