Not so fast, Google

Is the Google Web Accelerator (GWA) beta the worst-designed, most ill-conceived piece of software ever unleashed on the Internet-using public? Sure looks like it, based on the blogstorm of criticism it has sparked.

37signals' Signal vs. Noise offers a very straightforward explanation of one of its key risks presented by GWA's pre-fetching of all content linked from the present page, so they'll load faster: "Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like 'delete this' or 'cancel that.' And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a 'Are you sure you want to delete this?' Javascript confirmation behind that 'delete' link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway."

It gets worse, according to Inside Google. GWA builds a centralized cache of pages that users load ... even if they're pages that only other people are supposed to 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."

Google's response, recounted to eWeek, is that the most egregious verified problems are actually the fault of site operators, who aren't following Web standards. According to News.com, GWA "is deactivating the mechanism that caches vulnerable Web pages." Apparently, it never prefetched or cached pages from secure sites using the HTTPS protocol, such as online banks or Webmail clients.

John Battelle thinks that it's "a cool idea" to leverage Google's existing infrastructure and technology ... at least in theory (Tristan Louis expands on its technical merits). "However," he adds, "you do start to run all your web surfing habits over Google's servers, and that, of course, makes Google something of a proxy ISP, with access to all the aggregate data that an ISP like AOL or Comcast has on you. Is that a good thing? Well, yes and no. But ... it has implications down the road. Very soon, Google will know an awful lot about the world's surfing habits, well beyond search. Hmmm."

Al Kao is far less sanguine about GWA's shortcomings: "If you value your personal information and security, do NOT use Google Web Accelerator!" He has a good collection of links to key criticisms.

Even if GWA worked flawlessly as intended, however, its widespread adoption would still hold major repercussions for Web site operators. FantoMaster offers a good, if somewhat hysterical, run-down of the key points. One biggie: pre-fetching links in ads amounts to click fraud. The site also explains how to block GWA, with detailed instructions for servers running Apache.

(Incidentally, Google is no longer accepting GWA beta testers, InsideGoogle reports -- but the software still appears to be available for download.)