Plaidophile

I can't decide whether this is more 'evil' than autolink. Probably not, but Google is walking a tight line for me. They are essentially trying to replace the web with gww (google wide web), their own copy of the web.

Yeah, it's annoying that people seem to worship it.

Yeah. I also don't like the whole rel="nofollow" thing; it's duct-tape which puts the onus on websites for fixing their search heuristic, which is too little, too late, since spammers no longer even notice whether links have any effect, they just do it anyway. Not to mention that all of the comment spam only stays around on sites which aren't actually maintained anyway.

That makes sense now. I tried it out, and it FUBAR'd everything it loaded. What junk. How hard is it to get a decient fast connection anyway? I have very little tollerance for people who whine that they don't want to pay $24.95 a month or whatever to AOL. My usual response is, "Ok, then don't. But, don't whine to me that the net is slow, bucause it will cause me to point at you, and laugh." Who needs something to make the web faster? Just get a fast connection. Even Yahoo DSL (managed by the scumsucking bastards at SBC) is like less than $25/mo. Who needs dialup on a daily basis?

Prefetch "accelerators" are crap anyway. If they did some sort of HTML compression and image filtering, it'd be much more useful.

I believe they do do some sort of compression, which is why it has to run through a proxy instead of working directly.

rel="nofollow" isn't as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. It may be a nonstandard extension, but it's entirely compatible both with browsers and with the spec, and, although it isn't a solution in and of itself, it certainly isn't the only step that Google's taking to improve search results. It isn't "putting the onus on websites for fixing their search heuristic", it's giving websites the option to tag links as "untrusted - don't consider this link for rankings". And, although comment spammers may not bother to check to see if links are marked as nofollow, it will make comment spamming less effective. Which is always a good thing.

Google's auto-link has also attracted a lot more attention than it deserves. What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that their links DON'T SHOW UP unless the user clicks a button on the toolbar, and, even then, they're visually distinct from the rest of the links on the page! It's a world apart from Microsoft's proposed linking, which would have automatically placed links into text that were indistinguishable from normally placed links.

Vlad: Dialup's not only for those who don't want to pay. Well, maybe it is in the USA, but in Europe more than a few areas you can't get DSL or cable. Admittedly, you can usually get ISDN there (that's what I'm using, since I can't get DSL in Villa Literno, Italy), but ISDN isn't cheap at all. 100+ Euro/month. So some of us are stuck with slow, sucky links anyway.

The technically minded can come up with more useful 'accelerator' solutions, like running a local web and DNS cache, but setting up BIND and Squid isn't everyone's cup of joe.

To be sure, I was certainly speaking from a North American mindset.

Makes more sense, then. Wiredness is good

I, for one, would gladly pay up to $150/month for even a 512k pipe (though the DSL service one town over goes as high as 4Mbit, and cable where available is up to 16), so I guess I'm not one of the whiners

Yeah, most people don't prioritize their Internet access that much though.