There has been a lot of talk around the blogs today on Google’s new Web Accelerator but one of the unique perspectives I’ve seen is an essay by Mike Lambert titled PageRank 2.0. Mike explains the lack of income stream attached to the Web Accelerator by speculating that it will actually help Google to more accurately rank pages in a climate where inbound links are less and less reliable for ranking the page rank of a site (due to spam).
‘Instead of using a random surfer model, Google can use a real surfer model, based on the aggregate web traffic of the people using their Web Accelerator. They can discover /exactly/ how the Google Juice should flow in the real world.’
The Google Web Accelerator Privacy Policy says could support this theory as it includes the statement – ‘When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests…’
It’s an interesting theory – and one that I’m sure will be debated by many for some time to come. What do you think?
Update: Check out some of the following discussions going on in forums – all in all the reaction to the Accelerator is NOT positive:
Also check out Inside Google’s take:
‘The privacy implications are staggering. Google can now know absolutely everything. If they thought Gmail created a mess when the Gmail ad thing went down, its going to look like a stubbed toe next to this. The hell will rain down on Google over the following weeks, you better believe it.’
No offense, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is what Google is doing. After blogging for a few weeks, my opinion of Google has changed drastically and the not be evil mantra in some respects seems like crap.
Some might say this is merely par for the course business tactics, I could accept that if the company didn’t try to be so high minded.
All in all, I don’t know how this could help make PageRank more accurate as it seems it would only cover a small percentage of users.
If this is what they are up to, they need to improve their product first or their only going to get numbers from people who are gullible enough to believe they are saving time, just because the little icon says they are. I ran it for about an hour and got tired of the proxy server refusing my requests. Bloglines was very spotty and would completely lock up with the accelerator on. They claimed ot have saved me 2.9 minutes, but that doesn’t include the time they cost me as I waited for websites that never came up.
Manual trackback. :o)
Google’s loosing it’s shining touch very quickly this year.
“Sometimes articles need a bit longer to sink in my brain and raise the alarm, but of course if Darren blogs about it, it has to be important ;o) The new Google ‘feature’ is here. And once again this year, Google manages it to disappoint. ”
http://blogpraxis.de/archive/2005/05/06/googles_loosing_its_shining_to
Big problem for WordPress bloggers – Web Accelerator “prefetches” all your “delete” links while you’re working in the “manage” page. It ignores the javascript confirmations, so it can wipe out your blog.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/33103
Darren, I emailed you on this also, because you may want to put it on the front page.