Much Controversy Over Google’s Accelerator
Right before he clicked on the “upload” button, the person at Google who put the Web Accelerator online probably took a nice big swig from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Why must this be, having not been in the room and having no evidence to prove so? Because no rational human being could have posted this program without needing to steady himself, preparing for the storm that was to come.
You thought Autolink and Desktop Search and Gmail were bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Yesterday, Google released perhaps its most controversial product ever: The Google Web Accelerator. Its a simple product, one that promises to speed up your internet connection like many little applications have in the past. It doesn’t seem like much.
Of course, peer a little deeper, and you might even be impressed. The ideas behind Web Accelerator are pretty nice, smart enough to be worthy of a Googler’s 20% time. Google has essentially decided to make “an extra copy” of the entire World Wide Web (or at least the HTML and images of it) and let you run it off their servers, because Google’s servers are always faster (Blogger and Orkut aside, of course).
Dig even deeper and the picture grows to reveal a whole nother world of possibilities. Google is really offering to replace the web, wanting everyone to use their copy instead of the public copy. While the World Wide Web is currently a decentralized network of worldwide servers, Google wants the whole web to run off its computers, in one of its anonymous, nondescript data centers.
Look just a bit deeper and the picture becomes a bit murky. If you run the web off Google’s computers, then Google knows everything you do. It reads every page you read, every email you write and send, and sees every bit of pervertedness you look at. Google has complete control of your web, and the freedom to change it as it sees fit, if it ever decides to. More importantly, Google can keep a record of everything you do, information that could prove quite valuable.
Now, pull out your microscopes. That murkiness? It’s not confusion, or paranoia. No, your internet just got a little darker, because someone has decided to crap on it.
See, Google isn’t serving web pages faster, its serving other people’s versions of the web page faster. What does that mean? Try using Web Accelerator on a forum site, one with lots of geeks who love Google and probably already have Web Accelerator installed. Why, if you’re lucky, you’ll be logged in as someone else, as the folks at SomethingAwful.com discovered. The posters in that forum discovered that most of the times they refreshed the page, they were logged in as a different person, seeing their friend’s control panel for the forums.
They were even kind enough to provide screenshots.
This isn’t the first time Google has stepped in it.
Controversy, that is. Thirteen months ago, when Gmail was “released” into beta, the concept of an ad system that read your email frightened folks. Last October, when Google Desktop Search hit, the call from IT departments was to stay away over security concerns. And just a few months ago, an Autolinking feature in Google’s newest toolbar angered many prominent bloggers.
All of those were concerns. This is real.
Installing Accelerator will, at some point, let you into a private area you shouldn’t be seeing. Maybe it’ll be a control panel or options area for a logged in user. Maybe it’ll be a porn site with password protection. Maybe it will be a private Microsoft message board where developers discuss trade secrets regarding the next version of Windows. It will happen, and when it does, I expect screenshots.
Oh, there are benefits to using the Accelerator. Web pages run more than twice as fast, no doubt about it. And there is a benefit to Google, a perfectly nice one at that. By seeing where you browse, Google knows which pages are useful and which are spam. After all, a fake link designed to curry favor with Google won’t get any clicks, so Google knows to just go ahead and ignore it.
But are the benefits worth the costs? Web Accelerator is free, so the cost of using it is not readily apparent. For example, on any site that has a logon, you must tell Web Accelerator not to index them. In addition, anyone who runs a website with any user-specific data, you must add “pragma no-cache” to the HTML header of every page to prevent problems. Accelerator might break site statistics (so very valuable to most webmasters), so it’s almost advisable to site owners to disable Web Accelerator on every single page. According to Search Engine Journal, webmasters have a much simpler way of blocking Web Accelerator, by banning the IP address ranges 72.14.192.0 – 72.14.192.255.
In fact, if there are so many negatives to this product from a webmaster perspective, who would anyone not disable caching of their pages? Of course, if Google has released a product so damaging that it requires a massive edit of the entire internet, maybe it shouldn’t be their problem, it should be Google’s.
So, what’s the big upside, the one reason so tempting that Google can assure it will not see a mass banning of its product?
PageRank.
The hidden benefit is that sites which allow usage of the Accelerator will likely get a boost in Google rankings relative to sites that do not. Google will have deeper usage data for those sites, data which can be used to determine that site’s rankings. Given the highly competitive search engine optimization field, and Google’s lofty place within it, that may be a temptation that proves too juicy to resist.
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Thanks to Keith for the Something Awful link. Check out his excellent music blog at Teaching The Indie Kids To Dance Again.
UPDATED to include the info on IP range blocking.
UPDATE: Welcome Slashdotters! You might also be interested in my other articles on the Google Web Accelerator. Here’s a search for them, and here are all the articles so far:
Google Web Accelerator - Wednesday, May 4
Google Web Accelerator Brings Up A Lot Of Questions - Wednesday, May 4
Much Controversy Over Google’s Accelerator - Thursday, May 5 (this article)
Web Accelerator Changes Your 404 Page - Thursday, May 5
Web Accelerator Can Delete Your Account - Friday, May 6
How Much Time Does Web Accelerator Save? - Friday, May 6
Think Before You Worship: Do no evil, unless it makes you money.
Comment by AC | May 5, 2005
have you been able to reproduce what’s happening at the Something Awful forums, or are you going by just what they are saying there?
Comment by Hashim | May 5, 2005
I question the suggestion above that “pragma no-cache” will be honored by Google. All I see at http://webaccelerator.google.com/webmasterhelp.html are instructions about telling Google which links to prefetch. But at the same time, I’m hearing reports that lacking your suggestions, Google has its own prefetch algorithms. For example, if you mouseover a link, it will prefetch it on the speculation that you might soon click it.
I’d appreciate it if anyone can confirm whether the no-cache pragma causes Google to pass the page through without any caching, prefetching, or other manipulation. But it hardly makes much difference. It’s easier just to block Google’s IP addresses that are fetching your pages for the accelerator.
Comment by Daniel Brandt | May 5, 2005
When something doesn’t make sense, it’s time to question the assumptions.
It doesn’t make sense that Google would naively release a little speed utility that any dummy could see would cause convulsions in anyone concerned about privacy and security.
Even though PageRank and relevant search are the coin of the realm, it doesn’t make sense to me that Google would release something this controversial to achieve that.
There’s something more to this, a unifying theory that brings it all together. I’m still stuck on Larry Page’s promise, “What we’ve done for the Web, Google aims to do for television.” I’ve written a number of riffs on this, fwiw.
I’ve gotta conclude that after the Gmail hysteria, Google could see the GWA firestorm coming. GWA must be so strategic and central to Google’s future that they pushed forward with it in spite of the public backlash.
I could certainly be wrong, but the stars seem to be aligning around a push into the living room with Google TV. Indexing TV content, talk of a TiVo marriage, Current TV, hosting video content (not just indexing it) — and now hosting the Web close to the user to solve latency and bandwidth issues. Google’s spending half a billion bucks this year on new capacity, more than they’ve spent in the last two years combined — just for search? Google TV seems to be a consistent unifying theory that explains why Google’s doing things that don’t seem to make any sense.
Comment by Mahlon | May 5, 2005
[…] ople – that is, someone using Google’s Accelerator saw they were logged into a forum under some other use […]
Pingback by » Blocking Google’s Web Accelerator - Search Engine Journal | May 6, 2005
Search google for the person who announced WebAcc on the googleblog. Visit his website and see which open source products he wrote….. Then consider what code runs behind Google’s WebAcc…
Comment by RichB | May 6, 2005
Very interesting stuff:
http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | May 6, 2005
but beyond all the privacy concern, is GWA all about search. I think so and elaborate in this entry on my blog.
Comment by Tristan Louis | May 6, 2005
Note that every web site that sends out private information should already be using no-cache. Not that this isn’t Google’s problem, but this is just making more apparent an existing problem for a given site. The same thing — being logged in as the wrong user — can happen with caching proxies, and so you see it sometimes in a corporate environment, for example, with multiple users of the same site that has broken cache headers using the same caching proxy.
Comment by pudge | May 6, 2005
I have a screenshot of this page before it hit the web!
Comment by Google Inc. | May 6, 2005
Monolith Empire Down with GOogle!
Comment by Mike | May 6, 2005
hi, i want gmail
Comment by woo | May 6, 2005
AOL has been doing this for a while with their topspeed shit.. I bet their spying on their users much more too.
Comment by s00pcan | May 6, 2005
they are.
Comment by s00pcan | May 6, 2005
I wholeheartedly agree with pudge - as long as google is honoring pragma, this is the webmaster’s faults.
proxy cache has been around a long time, in use by some major ISPs and especially corps. What google did is create a juxtaposition of sites that were put up as hobbies and a bunch of their users using the same proxy. But that isn’t google’s fault.
I expect google will end up adding in an automated tool that checks for commonly used password fields and cookies and automatically nocache’s those sites… but that will really only hide the problem.
Comment by xig | May 6, 2005
Quoting your article: “the World Wide Web is currently a decentralized network of nationwide servers…” The web is world-wide, not nation-wide.
Comment by Dan | May 6, 2005
Oops, sorry Dan. I fixed it.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | May 6, 2005
They don’t have the Internet outside of America do they?
Comment by Peter | May 6, 2005
As someone who recently wrote a web server and CMS, I have to say that this is in no way Google’s fault. A properly-written web app MUST set “Cache-Control: private” (somewhat better than “Pragma: no-cache”) on all private pages. “Vary: Cookie” would also be a good idea. To fail to do this is a security hole, plain and simple. It was a security hole long before Google’s Web Accelerator. All Google did was make this hole more visible, which is arguably a good thing, since now these holes will be fixed.
Except, if all you do is ban Google’s IP from your site, you aren’t fixing anything. You still have the security hole. It can still be exploited by people on office networks and various ISPs’ “accelerator” services. And now people who want to use Google’s rather-useful service are locked out of your site. Essentially, you are killing a good service as an alternative to fixing problems in your own software.
Such behavior reminds me of the time when AOL blocked all of its users from accessing Apache-based servers because a bug in AOL’s browser caused it to interpret Apache’s responses wrong.
Comment by Kenton Varda | May 7, 2005
[…] r Source […]
Pingback by GamersCircle :: Much Controversy Over Google's Accelerator | May 7, 2005
the web accelerator loses pace - google stopped distribution of the plugin. gives them some time for tuning and security improvements. they will need it
Comment by 00blogger | May 8, 2005
I’m the admin over at Something Awful. We were sending Cache-Control: headers (nocache specifically) by default as set by our forum software. We were still seeing some strange problems, though I could not see a specific pattern to it. I adjusted various things and changed Cache-Control to private.
Read sections 13 & 14 in the HTTP specification. It dictates how caches should treat your data.
Any public caching proxy is dangerous. Casual web users do not know what a proxy is, nor are they aware of the security/privacy issues their use introduces. We asked our users not to use GWA for this reason.
Comment by radium | May 8, 2005
Will this not cost Google a fortune in bandwidth costs?
Comment by Joe | May 9, 2005
If Google can afford spending half a billion dollars on upgrading their capacity this year alone, I highly doubt that brandwidth concerns would be a problem… especially not when you consider the value one might price owning the entire web at.
Comment by gar | May 9, 2005
Hey, don’t blame the JD!
I don’t know why Google don’t just set the accelerator to download images and css files. HTML makes for tiny files that take virtually no time to download, so why not concentrate on accelerating the big items - images etc? Stupid Google …
Comment by Dave Child | May 12, 2005
Blame Jack? Never! I give “the JD” credit for helping software engineers finsih difficult jobs for many years.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | May 12, 2005
[…] a phonebook in half, how does that constitute Strongman Much Controversy Over Google̵ […]
Pingback by FirstLeft » Delicious Links | May 30, 2005
[…] h a track from garageband.com. This episode is the longest episode so far. minutia: 01:19 Google Web Accelerator 04:57 new eMacs […]
Pingback by Zach’s Blog » Zach’s Blog Audio Edition 05/06/05 | June 1, 2005
[…] Much Controversy Over Google’s Accelerator
July 4th, 2005
Original Article Right before he clic […]
Pingback by IsGoogleEvil?com » Blog Archive » Much Controversy Over Google’s Accelerator | July 4, 2005
One major point is after google went public they will have to continue to make more money every month.
I belive this will make them use that info and sell all you info to keep profits going up. I agree with the article and it is very alarming if you think it over.
Try the free acelerator on this site
http://www.webspawner.com/users/acelerator/
Thanks rick your site is very good and i will probaly link to it when i do article on firefox.
Comment by The Best of The Net. | July 29, 2005
[…] Google tried pulling the same thing with Web Accelerator, and the net freaked out. Ultimately, Web Accelerator was pulled. Google Secure Access has the same benefits for Google as Web Accelerator did, with fewer of the things that scared away people the first time. […]
Pingback by » Google Pulls The Other Leg With Secure Access InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel | September 19, 2005
[…] Many people saw this as the motive behind Web Accelerator, and theythe net freaked out. Ultimately, Web Accelerator was pulled. Google Secure Access would provide similar benefits for Google as Web Accelerator did, with fewer of the negatives, and the added plus of a ‘free’ VPN service. […]
Pingback by My Stuff » Blog Archive » google secure access network | September 20, 2005
“I don’t know why Google don’t just set the accelerator to download images and css files. HTML makes for tiny files that take virtually no time to download, so why not concentrate on accelerating the big items - images etc? Stupid Google … ”
Stupid Google? What do you mean??? how the hell are you going to know what images to cache unless you download the freakin html that has the references to the images and css to begin with. That IS! what google is doing. They know the HTML is the easy part. But, they have to get the html so they can figure out what images/css to download.
Wake up.
Comment by will | September 27, 2005
Will, I don’t think Dave was arguing that Google shouldn’t accellerate html. That would just be stupid (as you point out), breaking the whole system. I think he was arguing that they should accelerate more than just images, which I kind of agree with (although I don’t agree with the whole Web Accelerator concept entirely). If you are going to accelerate the web, to me, that means html, images, flash and pdf at a minimum.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | September 28, 2005
[…] You can read more over at Inside Google or at these digg stories. […]
Pingback by Chris Barnes’ Jottings » Blog Archive » Google releases controversial web accelerator | November 3, 2005
Webmaster Related Forums with Discussion on Search Engine Optimization, Google Traffic, Yahoo Rankings, MSN SERPs and much more.
Comment by deepak | December 3, 2005
I don’t see a difference in using GWA. Even after so long, it’s not like it has saved me a lot of time.
Comment by Adrian Lee | December 25, 2005
[…] Where did it go wrong? The “prefetching” methods used by the GWA have come under scrutiny by many people. Google’s prefetching methods appear to do more damage to the server in order to save a little time for the average user. People who use web applications (email, site administration, blog, social networking, photo sharing service) should be equally concerned– GWA’s prefetching ignores Javascript and can accidentaly prefetch a page that deletes or removes items from your web application. To add to the mess there is the constant concern with the lack of security and privacy provided by the service. Just how much does Google know about our browsing habits? […]
Pingback by Will Urbanski’s Blog | December 29, 2005
[…] Take the Google Web Accelerator for example, the kind of product which other less laudable companies have oft touted in the software world’s version of late night infomercial. In the case of Google’s product it probably has real benefits to modem and other niche users (does anyone have any data on this?) but isn’t particularly interesting if you have broadband. It was first released in May, and pulled shortly afterwards due to privacy issues and major bugs, despite their claims of capacity issues. Then it was re-released in October and once again it was pulled due to a bug. And again they claimed that supporting all the folks falling over each other to accelerate their web experience was just too much. Now it is back again and I’ve been playing with it a bit. It is a useful tool for browsing Slashdot (combats the Slashdot effect when lots of users are requesting the same content) but in general it does not really provide adequate benefits for broadband users to justify the very real risks to both proper functioning of websites and to your security. […]
Pingback by Google Hosting at Infreemation | January 3, 2006
[…] GWA’s reliance on caching is already showing serious privacy issues, noteably the caching of private login info. People are finding themselves logged in as someone else on pages that require a login (and probably realizing that others are going to be logged in as them). […]
Pingback by michaelzimmer.org » Blog Archive » Google Web Accelerator: More (Scary) Problems | January 6, 2006
[…] Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle (a great blog I recently discovered) adds to the growing concerns with GWA, realizing that Google is essentially privatizing the Web through their vast cache of sites: Google has essentially decided to make “an extra copy” of the entire World Wide Web (or at least the HTML and images of it) and let you run it off their servers, because Google’s servers are always faster (Blogger and Orkut aside, of course). […]
Pingback by michaelzimmer.org » Blog Archive » Google Web Accelerator: Google’s Private Web? | January 6, 2006
[…] Links:  Inside Google: Much Controversy Over Google’s Accelerator  Threadwatch.org: Code to Block Google Web Accelerator […]
Pingback by Google i modvind over Web Accelerator - Mikkel deMib Svendsen | March 11, 2006
In response to #33 (Wil):
Read up on the nitty-gritty of HTTP, you don’t seem to understand how requests work.
Comment by Anti-Wil | April 9, 2006
Scary!
Comment by Thomas | April 22, 2006
[…] Google launched their Web Accelerator yesterday which has raised some eyebrows in the webmaster and privacy worlds although it does offer a helpful web acceleration tool. Google’s Web Accelerator is not only serving pages faster, sources report that it’s serving the wrong web pages to the wrong people – that is, someone using Google’s Accelerator saw they were logged into a forum under some other username. […]
Pingback by Search Engine Journal » Blocking Google Web Accelerator | May 6, 2006
[…] A detailed report about the concerns over Google’s new Web Accelerator application and reports of it breaking customization and security features on certain websites. The basic gist is that Google caches pages seen by other people and it isn’t smart enough to know “Hey, this page probably shouldn’t be cached.”read more | digg story […]
Pingback by Google’s Web Accelerator Breaking Security and Personalization on Sites - The Digg Effect - Search for Diggs or get Dugg | June 16, 2006
fuck you, your site sucks. your just jealous of google dats all….
Comment by bond | July 4, 2006
[…] A detailed report about the concerns over Google’s new Web Accelerator application and reports of it breaking customization and security features on certain websites. The basic gist is that Google caches pages seen by other people and it isn’t smart enough to know “Hey, this page probably shouldn’t be cached.”read more | digg story […]
Pingback by Security » Google’s Web Accelerator Breaking Security and Personalization on Sites | August 31, 2006
This is a great program for those users who don’t know anything about how computers and/or the internet works, and/or just want to experience the “feel good illusion” of (not really) increased speed by having an entirely useless acceleration program on their hard drive.
Still you’ve got to admire Google’s chutzpa here; I’m guessing that it has to be the most hilarious bit of shell-game spyware ever invented by any company in the entire history of computer or Internet use and development.
Very clever really, when you consider that the trade off is that users “think” they’re getting “increased” internet speed; in exchange for revealing exact the name of every single webpage that you ever visit from the moment that you install Google Web Accelerator until (hopefully) the moment you wise up and remove it.
After Google Web Accelerator is installed it does absolutely nothing to improve browsing. Also Google Web Accelerator collects copies of web pages, (including prefetched pages that you did not even visit), in the Google Web Accelerator cache on your computer.
All this does in effect; is collect and store a gazillion MB of temp files every time you use it for a session of surfing; and Google gets to know the exact the name of every single webpage that you ever visit for products, news, banking, whatever! This is very valuable information to have; not only does Google know everything you click on, but you get zero in exchange for this info.
Finally, Google admits on their own support page that any and all passwords, e-mail addresses etc. you enter in a web form (e. g. when purchasing an item online) will be funneled via their systems. If you enter personally identifiable information (such as an email address) onto a form on an unencrypted web page, the sites will send this information through Google.
Had he lived long enough to see this, P.T. Barnum; the person who coined the phrase: “A Sucker is Born Every Minute” would most certainly consider those who download, install and leave this program on their computers to be suckers indeed!
Comment by The Ghost of PT Barnum | September 24, 2006
[…] Take the Google Web Accelerator for example, the kind of product which other less laudable companies have oft touted in the software world’s version of late night infomercial. In the case of Google’s product it probably has real benefits to modem and other niche users (does anyone have any data on this?) but isn’t particularly interesting if you have broadband. It was first released in May, and pulled shortly afterwards due to privacy issues and major bugs, despite their claims of capacity issues. Then it was re-released in October and once again it was pulled due to a bug. And again they claimed that supporting all the folks falling over each other to accelerate their web experience was just too much. Now it is back again and I’ve been playing with it a bit. It is a useful tool for browsing Slashdot (combats the Slashdot effect when lots of users are requesting the same content) but in general it does not really provide adequate benefits for broadband users to justify the very real risks to both proper functioning of websites and to your security. […]
Pingback by Nudecybot » Google Hosting - why Google will target the hosting industry next | October 29, 2006
Áhyggjur af Google
» Much Controversy Over Google’s Accelerator » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel “Dig even deeper and the picture grows to reveal a whole nother world of possibilities. Google is really offering to replace the web, wanting everyone…
Trackback by Hjalið | December 25, 2006
OK you are just fucking stupid. Google isnt out to replace the internet. For one, that’s impossible. The sheer amount of data hosted on an uncountable number of computers and/or servers is too much for any one server (no matter how good it may think it is) to handle. Google accelerator simply creates lower resolution versions of the pictures and displays them instead of the full resolutions that may take a long time to load. Earthlink had a product some years ago that was very similar for dial-up connections. It would display very low resolution versions of all pictures and if you wanted to see the full pictures all you had to do was right click the picture and click display full resolution picture. To think google is out to or even could replace the internet is ignorance and absurdity.
Comment by Anonymous | April 30, 2007
says who? from the poster who has no balls to post his name.just shut up loser, i know about the earthlink service and its diff from the GWA. so juts go home and do your homework. ok, and save your self from utter embarassment.
Comment by Dan | July 18, 2007
[…] It has also been reported that Google Web Accelerator can mistake your identity and give you access, inadvertently, to other peoples private data. An example of this is that when viewing web sites that require a login, sometimes Web Accelerator shows you the cached sessions of other users! This allows somewhat random access by random users to private profiles and data. While this will not work on protected web sites, such as banks, the results still create a privacy and security threat. […]
Pingback by Alex Lowe on Software and Technology » Google Is Evil, Part 1 on Privacy | July 25, 2007
Google controls the web.. that is what they want, but the users are smarter than that.
Comment by Lars Bachmann | August 21, 2007
i think Google’s Accelerator is useless.http://www.mytailorstore.com is my site.the time is installed google Accelerator i was unable to open my site but from other computer yes.but then i uninstall that then i again i was able to open my site.so if it works like that then i think the people who have this program installed they are unable to open not only mine site but of others too.
Comment by vicky sethi | October 10, 2007
I have´nt had much use of it either.
Comment by Oza | November 25, 2007
Interesting stuff.. Google just shows it’s power
Comment by Atak | November 18, 2009