Google to boost your internet connection with Web Accelerator

Google today unveiled the beta verison of a new application to speed up your internet. The Web Accelerator tool is designed for broadband and has an easy to use interface. It integrates into your web browser and also tells you how much time you have saved. Google says that dial-up users aren't likely to see much improvement because the tool is currently optimized to boost web page loading for broadband connections.

The tool uses a few tricks to speed up your internet:

• Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
• Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
• Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
• Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
• Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
• Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

But there are also a few remarks about Web Accelerator. Some people report that some sites that use cookies, like forums, don't work properly when you use Web Accelerator. So some sites will need to be added to the ignore list of Web Accelerator, if you plan to use this utility. Also notice that there are some privacy concerns as Google can now gather even more user data.

Google Web Accelerator can be downloaded here and the FAQ can be found here