Join the Google Web Accelerator slammin’ fun!
So there’s this big debate going on at 37signals.com about the Google Web Accelerator. It seems that the GWA prefetches links on a web page, storing the pages at Google’s boxes and sending them down Google’s big fat pipe to any users that request them.
This causes many problems. For one, links in web applications (GMail, Wordpress, Backpackit to name a few) often are not “idempotent”... a great term basically meaning “doesn’t do anything”. If the action of clicking a link causes the same result each time then that link is idempotent. “Delete this” links, for instance, cause something different to happen when they are clicked: a different thing gets deleted.
So anyway… GETs vs. POSTs aside, there’s also some privacy issues. “How many people asked for our page in the last 12 hours, Google?” “How many people were exposed to our advertisement, Google?” “How many people are using your competitor’s search engines and your own to search for our product, Google?”
Thanks but no thanks. I think Google has strayed from the “do no evil” plan.