Google's Web Accelerator as a P2P CDN
I admire Google's guts in deploying their Web Accelerator. Proposing to act as an intermediary for the whole planet's web traffic takes a lot of courage and a certain amount of audacity. Interestingly, the system's design can be quite scalable, through the use of peer-to-peer and personalization technology.
The Web Accelerator depends on an application deployed on each client machine. The web acceleration works using a number of techniques, such as prefetching, compression, and the use of Google's cache. All requests go through a client installed on the user's computer. This client can notify Google about the pages each user visits, and therefore Google can create a very accurate personalization model about which pages to prefetch for other users. Even better, the client could in the future fetch material, not from Google's cache, but from an idle Web Accelerator client of a nearby computer. Thus Google can gain traction and momentum to deploy a peer-to-peer content delivery network.
The value of the complete page visiting habits of all the world surfers is, of course, priceless. Google's army of Computer Science PhDs is definitely not sitting idle.
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