Search Engine Marketing

Blocking Google Web Accelerator

Loren Baker

05/5/05

5 Comments

Blocking Google Web Accelerator

Google launched their Web Accelerator yesterday which has raised some eyebrows in the webmaster and privacy worlds although it does offer a helpful web acceleration tool. Google’s Web Accelerator is not only serving pages faster, sources report that it’s serving the wrong web pages to the wrong people – that is, someone using Google’s Accelerator saw they were logged into a forum under some other username.

Since such activity could pose both a security risk to web surfers and site owners, there are some web sites which are interested in not having Web Accelerator pick up their material. Nick at ThreadWatch picked up on a code which blocks Google Web Accelerator on one’s site because of such reasons. Here’s the scoop from FantoMaster : A very fast and efficacious method of denying Google Web Accelerator (GWA) funneled traffic access to your web site is blocking the IPs it is calling your pages from.

The current GWA IPs are allocated to the following IP range: 72.14.192.0 – 72.14.192.255

The best procedure for Linux/Unix systems is working with the .htaccess file and Apache’s module mod_rewrite.

For this to work, the following server configuration is required:

* Apache web server with module mod_rewrite installed.
* .htaccess functionality enabled.

If you don’t know whether these requirements are fulfilled please ask your system administrator – provided he or she
knows. They really should, but unfortunately some plain do not …
The .htaccess File

For the mod_rewrite technique to work, you will need to upload a file named .htaccess (please note the period/dot “.” at the beginning of the file name!) to your server’s HTML directory.

More on How to Block Google Web Accelerator

5 Comments

  • Sniptools says:

    Google Web Accelator (What it is and How to Block it)
    Google Web Accelator blocking

  • Google web accelerator review
    I had recently heard about the Google web accelerator, but it has been unavailable for download for a bit of time. Since it came back available on their website, I decided I would try it out to see what I would be able to get, what kind of speed would…

  • Katie says:

    I have a problem. I can not get to the google website on either my lap top or my desk top, but when i take my lap top to another wireless source, it comes up. Please help. Something is being blocked somewhere and I dont get it!

  • Montgomery says:

    How could google log in? and btw, don’t you usually need cookies to sign in somewhere?

  • Freecell says:

    What happened to the google accelerator? Are they still offering this service? is it still a big threat for webmasters?

Leave a Reply