Google Web Accelerator

Does your Internet connection seem slow? If one has broadband, one expects Web pages to load fairly fast. However, sometimes they don't due to various reasons. Google has a tool that may help alleviate some of those reasons. It's called the Google Web Accelerator. According to Google, "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."

Will this speed up a dial-up connection? Probably not. It's a Google Labs project that is designed for broadband connections. It requires Windows XP or 2000 SP-3 operating systems and Internet Explorer 5.5+ or Firefox 1.0+ browsers (or change the proxy settings if using another browser).