Google Offers To Re-Write Your Webpages On The Fly
July 29th, 2011If you think that this is just about speed, I’d urge you to consider Beware Online “Filter Bubbles”:
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.
My guess is that Google’s mega proxy service will eventually result in a “My Internet” option, which will censor material based on what Google thinks you want to see, even when you’re on sites that aren’t associated with Google. Like many creepy Google ‘features’, this might even be turned on by default.
If Google’s ascendency as a search provider, and the broad use of their other services (Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, and now Google+, among many others) weren’t disturbing enough, now Google wants to deliver content from other sites to you as well. Even if this was just about speed, which I’m sure it isn’t (long term), site operators are begging for trouble by placing Google in a position to re-write their content on the fly. It’s stark raving madness, if you ask me, and it will probably be very popular.
Via: TechCrunch:
Google has long been obsessed with speed. It’s paramount in pretty much everything they do. Which is why the launch of Google+ with some — gasp — attention paid to design is even more surprising. But a new service Google is launching this evening very much puts the focus back on speed — an obsessive amount of focus, one might say.
Page Speed Service is the latest tool in Google’s arsenal to help speed up the web. This service is also their most ambitious yet. When you sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google, they’ll enable the tool which will fetch your content from your servers, rewrite your webpages, and serve them up from Google’s own servers around the world. Yes, you read all of that correctly.
Related: U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators
Research Credit: HPLovecraft666
