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Your Online Guide to Finding Free Web Accelerators

What are Web Accelerators?

Reduced to their simplest terms, Web accelerators can best be described as a type of proxy server designed with the specific intention of reducing Web site access times. People are constantly looking for faster methods of Internet connectivity, be it a faster hardware connection such as a T1 or T3 line, or a systematic change within your own computer settings designed to free up as much processor resources as possible for establishing the fastest possible Internet connection.

There are multitudes of ways that Web accelerators can achieve their goal of reducing Web site access times. Some of the ways Web accelerators speed up their loading times include:

  • Certain Web accelerators function by filtering out advertisements and other unwanted items like pop-ups. Even something as small as a pop-up advertisement can be a drain on your system resources and therefore slow down your Internet connection.
  • Prefetching the data associated with Web sites that are likely to be accessed in the near future speeds up the loading process.
  • Certain Web accelerators cache frequently accessed documents so that data can be sent to the user with less latency and at a faster speed than normal.
  • Web accelerators tend to compress certain types of data such as images so that Web pages can open faster.

These are just a few of the common methods used by a plethora of Web accelerators to increase the speed that Web pages and other types of data are transferred across your Internet connection.

The Google Web Accelerator

If you’re looking to find free Web accelerators to try out with your system, then your first stop should be the Google Web Accelerator. By visiting the Web accelerator’s homepage at http://webaccelerator.google.com/, people looking for ways to speed up their data transfer rate can learn more about what the Google Web Accelerator can do for them, while at the same time getting their free download of the software (since the Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta form and still being tested by users, the ability to download the software fluctuates. It may or may not be available for widespread use).

Most Web accelerators are designed to work with the more dated methods of Internet connectivity such as dial-up, the idea being to get as much out of your meager connection as is possible. The Google Web Accelerator is designed with the intention of working with broadband Internet connections. In this way, the Google Web accelerator is revolutionary. The problem is that the beta version has met more controversy than other Web accelerators have. There are security concerns associated with the way the Google Web Accelerator functions. As a result, the full version of the Google Web Accelerator has yet to be released.

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