Google’s Accelerator Breaks Web Apps

May 10th, 2005 · No Comments

Google Web Accelerator

It seems that my hitherto published worries about Google Web Accelerator are being given some grounds by a recent article published in Eweek:

Google’s effort to speed the pace of Web browsing quickly aggravated some early users, who say that the software is delivering them Web pages under other users’ logins and breaking Web applications.

Google Inc.’s Web Accelerator application, launched as a test on Wednesday, uses a combination of local and server-based caching and preloading of Web pages to more quickly serve Web pages to a user’s browser. Google’s servers, in many ways, act as an intermediary between Web sites and a user’s browser.

But Google’s approach has had some unintended consequences. Google officials Friday confirmed that the company was aware of as many as five sites where Web Accelerator was returning users cached pages under other people’s user names.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has stopped caching pages from those sites, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web.

Users of some smaller Web forum sites have complained in online postings that they began receiving Web pages which displayed other people’s user names after downloading Web Accelerator. The forum site, Somethingawful.com, was among those warning its users to avoid Web Accelerator because of reports that pages from other users’ logins were exposed.

“It is an unfortunate problem, but it looks worse than it is,” Mayer said. “We are caching those pages on the server side with the user name on them…You see it, but it’s important to point out that you are not logged in as user and you do not have the session cookies needed to perform operations as [that] user.”

This just shows that Google is mortal and actually can do something wrong. Having all internet traffic going through a single hub is a bad idea in the first place. It goes against the whole idea of having a decentralized internet. But then of course, who am I to question Google….