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I tried out the Google Web Accelerator today - it’s an interesting product that likely is helping Google as much as those that install it.  I’ve seen a number of people discussing how Google can use it to silently spider the web.  Interestingly, a packet trace discovers that data flows upward from the user’s computer to Google’s servers - likely sending the data back to Google’s cache.

I wonder if this is similar to the “rsync HTTP cache” idea that was floated a while back.  It used a form of delta compression - possibly what this Google Accelerator product does.

Being the Linux geek that I am, I tried it out through Wine on my Fedora Core 3 box.  It turns out that Wine was missing an implementation of StgCreateStorageEx and StgOpenStorageEx.  After a quick implementation (and a post to wine-patches), I have the cache file creating correctly.  With this patch it runs for a bit and dies soon after.  I think it might have something to do with Wine’s winsock (but I haven’t looked closer).

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