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Google Web Accelerator

Announcement
May 4, 2005

As part of our ongoing effort to make it faster and easier for people to connect with the information they need, Google today announced the beta release of the Google Web Accelerator, a free downloadable application that speeds the delivery of web pages to users as they navigate the web.

Available today from Google Labs (labs.google.com) the Google Web Accelerator significantly reduces the time that it takes broadband users to download and view web pages. The Google Web Accelerator appears as a small speedometer in the browser chrome with a cumulative "Time saved" indicator.

Here’s how it works. A user downloads and installs the client and begins browsing the web as she normally would. In the background, the Google Web Accelerator employs a number of techniques to speed up the delivery of content to users.

The user’s computer and the Google Web Accelerator servers store these pre-fetched pages which makes it possible for the system to optimize the speed of retrieval of each page. For instance, if a web page changed slightly since it was last viewed, on the next visit the Google Web Accelerator would retrieve only those parts of the page that have changed. Google Web Accelerator also compresses data and sends it to the user via Google’s network of servers so as to avoid unnecessary network slowdowns.

The Google Web Accelerator is available in English-only today and can be downloaded at webaccelerator.google.com. It is available for Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP 3+ operating systems, and Internet Explorer 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+ browsers.

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