In reading the CNet story Google puts brakes on Accelerator, I found my bullshit detector going off repeatedly.
Google cited capacity as the reason for putting the brake on downloads of Accelerator, which is designed to speed the delivery of Web pages. A message on the site said the company has reached its "maximum capacity of users and (we) are actively working to increase the number of users we can support."
The weird thing is that I never heard or ready anyone complaining that the service was slow. Or unreliable.
Aside from Blogger slowness, I had always thought they knew how to build really big, scalable systems.
Hmm.
A Google representative denied on Wednesday that the removal of the tool was connected to the security fears. "It is a limited beta," he said, "and we reached the capacity of users."
Was it announced as a limited beta? I don't remember seeing that anywhere. And I can find no reference to it.
I have a hard time believing that a company with that much infrastructure is having capacity problems with a service that's likely being used by a relatively small number of people, considering how many were scared away by the admitted information leaks and security problems.
Posted by jzawodn at May 11, 2005 12:36 PM
Yes, I agree that was not as good as they were advertising and even I've heard of some bad issues such as clicking on delete links and etc. But there's some point about what you said that you did not heard any user complaining. As far as I remember (and it seems reasonable) the accelarator sends 2 requests one directly to the webserver and one to the google server and it will show the one which responds faster so in the worst case your speed will be equal to normal speed (or just a little less if both connection are active). But this means that when their servers are overloaded the users will not feel better using that so probably they decided to keep the current users happy and not spending too much money on new servers for such an application.
I have saved over one hour in one week with the Accelerator and like it a lot.
I did a write up on the technology today at thomashawk.com. There is a mirror link in the article where you can still download the Accelerator.
If these guys are really going to be the next Microsoft, they're going to need to learn how to fib better.
Not only that, every security complaint has gone unanswered. They are not ready to address the elephant in the room - the fact that private information like other user's information was leaked. Not that I am a Microsoft fan, but leaking private information seems worse than a reboot.
Making the entire web community as their testing organization had to come back to bite them at some point of time.
Since when has ability to support been a purely technical issue?
>Aside from Blogger slowness, I had always thought they knew how to build really big, scalable systems.
Orkut.com a social networking site brings a lot of shame to Google. First of all it's very slow and secondly in every 10 clicks on Orkut you are bound to get a Server error - simply frustrating. I hang out there as most of my friends have made their account there. Slowly I am convincing them to move to Yahoo! 360 :-)
*Aside from Blogger slowness, I had always thought they knew how to build really big, scalable systems.
What abt Orkut it is by far the worst site affiliated to Google, damn slow and too many "Bad Bad Server" Messages.
The web accelerator was the final straw for me -- no more google, and no more Gmail.
Its kind of creepy that a company really wants to recreate "1984".
Brian:
Absolutely agreed. The creepy PR makes it much worse. Every one of their blog postings is 2 parts. The first part is something personal 'I wanted to go to Taipei', 'I just moved to the Bay Area', 'My dentist told me to floss more' followed by a pitch for a new product.
Do people really believe that the web accelerator was driven by a dentist telling a software engineer to floss more?
And they still put you on their blog :) BTW totally agree with you. Downloaded test it and than uninstalled it :)
Hey, I didn't even install the vaunted Google Desktop Search utility! How many here bought into that one?
What's the big deal with Google anyway; don't you get pretty much the same search results using Yahoo! search?
Still like Google, but starting to become a tad disenchanted...
