Google Web Accelerator is a new beta tool you can install to cache big parts of the web sites you visit on the big google network.

You got it – then your surfing experience will become lightning fast, as Google has a HUGE distributed network of datacenters.

You got it again – then Google will know EXACTLY what sites you are visiting – combine this with your Google GMAIL account and your google alerts and you got a wonderful profile – adding Orkut to the game they will probably be able to forecast which pages you are going to visit next weekend.

Why is it free? well – The google web accelerator pre-loads the links you are only hovering over – very handy but generating considerable more traffic than before if you read a blog entry with a couple on hyperlinks in it.

By that Google is able to capture patterns of pages and their important parts – seen from a human perspective… no algos, just measurement… great,eh? and I am sure in their big data mining farm the "hovered links" and "pre-loaded" pages will soon be part of their normal page ranking algorithms…

Fine that this site will soon become much prettier and better designed – thanks to Elli…

Web accelerator is available for IE and Firefox, if you load the url above in Opera, you get redirected to the Google Toolbar 3 (beta) which also doesn't work in Opera :-)

The Google Web Accelerator Performance Statistics page shows you much time the Google Web Accelerator has saved you while surfing… This includes the number of pages that have been loaded and how long these pages would have taken to load with and without Google Web Accelerator. Impressing that only after an hour of browsing it already showed me 8 minutes saved or so… I have a hard time believing that, but it's an impressing number… imagine saving 13% of your time online :-)

Anyway… this approach is a completely new approach to a search engine behaviour measurement and I think this will bring the aspect on "good site design" into search engine optimization even more than before.