Google has been searching for applicants via MediaBistro to fulfill roles in New York, Chicago, and Mountain View. These jobs in consumer advertising insights (nice title) will fuel a project called the Google Brand Accelerator (GBA).

“GBA will allow Google to consistently deliver the most efficient and effective digital platform upon which the world’s leading brands are built,” said the posting. “We will connect advertisers’ brand message to the target audience at the highest moment of relevance through innovative and accountable online marketing solutions that offer unmatched precision and scale.”

Though they cited GBA as something to become an “indispensable partner” for advertisers and agencies, it sounds an awful lot like a step toward shoving aside the ad agency middleman. Why use a third party when Google can accelerate your brand through its dominant position in online advertising?

Back in July, when a Google blogger inadvertently shattered any remaining illusions about Google as a business, Danny Sullivan had this to say about Google and advertising in the health industry:

To be safer, Google ought to get back to just selling space and not trying to be an ad agency to these groups. That’s what ad agencies do, and they aren’t hit by the burden of also having to run supposedly unbiased information resources.

What happens to unbiased information resources when part of your company is busy trying to accelerate the brands of cash-carrying advertisers? Google’s position on this should be illuminating.

I take a strange bit of pride in something that required little more than a copy and paste job, but thanks to Widgetbox’s App Accelerator, I turned my blog into a bona fide Facebook application. I even have my very own API key.

It’s not a work of beauty, and it’s much easier to read this blog in an RSS reader, via email, on this site, on a personal homepage, or via just about any other way you’d choose. Yet for those who are least remotely curious what goes into the backend of these applications, it’s a fun experience to try – especially for those of us whose only developing experience was in photography class in high school (ahh, the smells of the dark room chemicals come back to me as I write this).

Thanks to Charlie O’Donnell for the link.

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"MySpaceTV is quickly becoming a popular destination for Internet TV, but that convenience and popularity is diminished if it takes too long for a video to load or if the playback experience is poor," said Justin Chapweske, founder and CEO of Swarmcast.

"Internet TV viewers want broadcast-quality reliability as well as the convenience of on-demand. Autobahn Accelerator is designed to make that easily possible, even with standard broadband and the average home networking set-up."

Autobahn Accelerator for MySpaceTV was developed by Swarmcast, the provider of multi-source streaming technology for online video delivery. It is the second in a series of accelerators following the launch of the Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes, which shortens the download times of music, movies and TV episodes from the iTunes store.

Since its enthusiastic adoption a year and a half ago, by Google, Six Apart, WordPress, and of course the eminent Dave Winer, I think we can all agree that nofollow has done nothing. Comment spam? Thicker than ever. It’s had absolutely no effect on the volume of spam. That’s probably because comment spammers don’t give a crap, because the marginal cost of spamming is so low.

But it’s worse than that, he claims.

Worse, nofollow has another, more pernicious effect, which is that it reduces the value of legitimate comments. Here’s how:

Why should I bother entering a comment on your blog, after all? Well, I might comment because you’re my friend. But I might also want some tiny little reward for participating in a discussion, contributing to the content on your site, and generally enhancing the value of the conversational Web. That reward? PageRank, baby. But if your blog uses the nofollow tag, you’ve just eliminated that tiny little bit of reciprocity. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather just comment on my own blog. And maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll link back to you.

I’ve seen that first hand. The “psychology of linking” did change in a fairly obvious way after nofollow started. Unfortunately, that was a downside that none of saw coming back when we announced our support. I’m not sure any of us expected people to ration their links as if they were somehow in limited supply. But it happened anyway.

Introducing even a fairly subtle and indirect “economic” model into a system always changes behavior. I know that I forget (or at least underestimate) that more often than I should.

Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link you make being counted in some global database of site endorsements, you’re probably over-thinking just a bit. Life’s too short for that, ya know? Link and be linked to. Let the search engines sort it out.

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

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Many thought that Google was dumping the program when it yanked the download two months ago, but Web Accelerator may be too large a part of Google’s web strategy for them to just give up on.

Perhaps they are working on new features that curb many of the fears about the program? If so, we could be moving towards a resumption of the beta. Of course, I never got the update to the program, because I, like so many others, uninstalled it after the big flap in May.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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Link: Whackbag.com

Wow. People sure are getting serious about Web Accelerator.

Whackbag runs off Vbulletin. Snow, who runs some great forums where you can unofficially discuss InsideGoogle and InsideMicrosoft at Aboho, pointed me to this thread where it is confirmed that Vbulletin version 3 is protected against any sort of Web Accelerator security threat. However, Vbulletin 2 is not, so upgrade if you want to remain secure.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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… in which cached copies of other users’ web pages are served up, does indeed exist, and that it is working on a solution.

Link: Google speed bump draws scorn

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Web products, said the company is working on a fix but downplayed the threat. “It looks worse than it is,” she said. “We’ve cached the page with that user name on it. But you are not actually signed in; you couldn’t operate as that person,” she said, adding it has affected only a small number of sites.

The article goes on to speculate that Google is getting into the business of market research, something Google denies. Mayer says the purpose of Web Accelerator is to save users time, time they can spend searching Google even more.

If the tool can help someone save two or three hours a month surfing the Web, that person might spend more time searching with Google, Mayer reasoned.

Yet another contingent, Web designers, has criticized the application for deleting Javascript commands or pages of their sites within the software environment. That means that people using Web Accelerator may not be able to hit the back button to return to a previous page. Google spokesman Nate Tyler said the company is also looking into that issue.

Take all that whatever way you’d like. If Google is in the business of releasing productivity tools solely so that Google fans have more free time to use Google, that would be very surprising indeed. Perhaps we will soon see that Google lava lamps are actually soothing devices designed to make surfing Google a pleasurable experience, designed to be used in conjunction with Google toilets, which save you waste-disposal time, time that could be better spent on Google. Perhaps. (via Brad Hill)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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This morning, the Inside Google blog published in its excellent article, Much Controversy of Web Accelerator, a very worrisome bug that is a byproduct of GWA-getting logged into some web sites as someone else! Or put in a more frightening way, others can see pages of YOURS as if they were logged in as you.

An excerpt:

“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.

They were even kind enough to provide screenshots.”

Read it. Then bookmark this article with this permalink and send it to your friends who might be using GWA. Quickly. I’ve just turned mine off.

Mark Fleming is the founder of a new blog called Google Tutor & Advisor. Google Tutor & Advisor offers in-depth Tips, Techniques and Advice for Google Users.

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In Firefox, this happens:

Google’s Web Accelerator serves up that page instead of a 404. This according to Benjamin Adam, who reminds us of when Verisign changed the 404 and caught hell for it. Of course, Google is different, because you choose to have it this way. The Google 404 page, of course, also has a link to a Google search.

I’m kind of surprised they don’t put the search results on the page.

The 404 page has a reason for existing in Firefox, as commenter Justin P. explains:

The reason that this only happens in Firefox is probably because IE serves up that little local document that says host not found. Firefox on the other hand presents an annoying pop-up window. Maybe Google’s thought is to get rid of that annoying pop-up?

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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A full review requires some lengthy experience with it, but here are the details:

Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.

Web Accelerator works by requesting web pages from a Google cache (not the regular web search cache, but one dedicated to GWA) and by prefetching pages. It watches your mouse movements to actually download pages before you click on the link, and only downloads the updates to pages, instead of the whole page. It also uses multiple pipes to reduce delays.

GWA is not recommended for dial-up, being made to speed up faster connections. It only speeds up web pages, not downloads or secure (https://) pages. However, everything you type in unencrypted pages does get sent to Google. If you are paranoid, disable GWA before entering your credit card number in anything without a security certificate.

Requirements:

To use Google Web Accelerator, your computer must have a Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP 3+ operating system. Google Web Accelerator works for the Internet Explorer 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+ browsers.

Other Windows browsers can use it, but need to be configured to run all HTTP connections through a 127.0.0.1:9100 proxy.

Webmasters should get used to seeing an X-moz: prefetch header in their site statistics. You can configure your pages to automatically prefetch certain links by adding this:
Don’t overdo it though, warns Google:

nor you want to overload your users’ connections with too large a download, and if a large number of links on a page are marked for prefetching, overall performance may diminish. So you should only specify prefetching for the links your users are most likely to click on.

Google also assures that (somehow) GWA doesn’t prefetch ad clicks.

GWA sits in both your system tray and your toolbar. There are three status icons:

– Running
– Off for this site
– Off entirely

The speedometer indicates your download speed.

The preferences let you turn on double-underlined links for prefetched pages, as well as block certain sites from prefetching. You can also go to a “races” page that gives stats on how much time you’ve saved:

Load Time for 31 Pages

Without Google Web Accelerator – 11.0 seconds
With Google Web Accelerator – 8.7 seconds

Total Saved Time – 2.3 seconds

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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