Google Offers Jump in Search Speed The search company's beta promises to deliver faster results. Tim Gray
Google Labs has released a beta version of its Web Accelerator software designed to make surfing the Internet faster and more efficient.
The search giant said the latest application will speed the online experience and save significant amounts of time when pulling up Web pages.
"Web Accelerator is an application that uses Google's global computer network to make Web pages load faster," the company said.
There are numerous strategies Google has employed to make Web browsing faster, including sending page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Web Accelerator traffic. It also stores copies of frequently viewed pages to make them quickly accessible.
The software downloads only Web pages that have been updated since they were last visited by a viewer, the company said. It also "prefetches" pages onto a computer in advance and then manages Internet connections to reduce delays, compressing the data before sending it out.
However, for security reasons the software does not speed the transfer of pages encrypted with the HTTPS: protocol, Google said.
Dial-up users will not experience a speed enhancement because the program has been optimized for broadband connections, Google said.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is also working to improve the ranking methods on Google News.
Recent patents filed in the U.S. and world patent offices detail a new approach to ranking news stories in Web search results. The system, dubbed "TrustSearch," would sort news by source, rather than the current method of classifying information based on a story's relation to a term.
The TrustSearch database instead would use a series of variables, including story length, number of staff employed by an organization and amount of traffic to its Web site.
Using that method, Web sites like CNN.com or the NYTimes.com for example, would receive more weight than organizations' sites with less gravitas.
Currently, Google News provides thousands of results based on relevance to the keyword entered.
