YOU feature on google's homepage! (possibly)

Today i've been re-affirming my love affair with google, by playing with some of their tools on offer in their "labs" area. I'm going to tell you about two of them: Personalized Homepage, and Google Download accelerator.

The personalized homepage ROCKS. Mostly because you can add your own sections provided by RSS feeds. This means my homepage not only features local weather, bbc news headlines, some tech news, a quote of the day, a word of the day and my favourite bookmarks, but it also includes the last 3 posts from my friends blogs. How cool is that my friends? You feature on google's homepage! Check it out:



The second tool i played with was Google's Download Accelerator. I think it's been done in one way or another before, the idea being that while you're internet connection would usually be idle (you're reading a webpage or whatever) it could be pre-fetching pages you might click to visit next. Then having already cached them it can present them to you faster.

I had mixed results. Sometimes it was noticeably faster (although my connection is pretty fast anyway) . Other times i suspected it might have been slowing things down.

There's a downside for those of you who are internet paranoid (they really ARE watching you you know). You have to agree during the install that you don't mind Google being sent personally identifiable information such as your IP address, and other such things that are sent to the sites you visit. I'm not entirely sure on the idea behind this, other than that it perhaps communicates back and forth with google and a clever algorithm (they love their algorithms at google) works out what you might click next in order to decide what to pre-fetch. Also, you'll be inadvertently visiting sites that are linked from the page you've viewing (or at least your IP address will be) whether you actually end up choosing to or not.

There was some delicious cleverness that i observed. You can enable it to underline in grey links that it's prefetching. Having this on, you'll notice it prefetches links you hover over, in anticipation of your click.

They've officially shut the supply of the beta of the Download Accelerator, but any good googler will find it for download on countless 3rd party sites.