Google web accelerator - a proxy?!?

[EKKC]

if you don't know what it is, download it and try it out, it alledgedly makes web browsing faster. i don't know how it could report to have saved me 10 minutes on limited browsing in half a day

http://webaccelerator.google.com/?subid=US-HA-EN&sourceid=gwa

(for both IE and FF)

when I used to browse some <ahem> adult torrent sites, it could geo-locate me and say "chat with so-and-so girls from your area" and label some fake girls with location close to my home (NYC, NY), but since using the GWA, now it says "Meet chicks from San Jose, California"

so is it a proxy? are all my web requests now directed to google's San Jose area servers?

 

[zoiks]

I used it for a bit but found out that my internet connection speed actually slowed down because of it. It made accessing pages so slow that I ended up disabling it.

 

[mundane]

I thought the point of the so-called accelerators was that they cached commonly requested content. Since their servers are the ones actually fetching the page, the web sites will use their IP for the geographic lookup.

 

[EKKC]

so could this be used to defeat content blockers form corporate offices?

i dont care for that, but just curious to know, im a consultant, i work at home 50% of the time and dont use the web when at a client.

 

[50]

www.pimpmyip.com

 

[ShadowBlade]

images are run through the proxy and lowered in quality, therefore lowering there size - lower end ones can sometimes make them grayscale
they also cache certain things

 

[waynehead]

fwiw, the filter i have on me right now believes it qualifies as "proxy avoidance." :thumbsdown: