Brief Review of Google Web Accelerator

There's good and bad news about Google Web Accelerator. The good news is that it works. It works well. Pages load faster. Installation is easy. The bad news is that the privacy implications are unsettling at best and at worst, staggering. See here, here, here, and here.
A description of Google Web Accelerator:

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.

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

• Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
• Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
• Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
• Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
• Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
• Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

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