Google To Offer Accelerate Web Access To Android Phones
Google is exploring some new ways to speed access to the web through your Android phone,and soon will start to roll out a new feature that could just do that. Rather than linking to a page directly from search results, Google links to its own servers, where it generates what it calls a transcoded version of the page on the fly. The process involves compressing graphics and removing some JavaScript functions.
Unfortunately, the feature will initially roll out in the next couple of weeks in India and Brazil only. But Google promises that with an Android phone and on a slow connection, like 2G, you should start to see pages loading a whole lot faster, while using far less data, via your Chrome or Android browser from Google’s search results.
Google has run field test in Indonesia of the new feature in Indonesia, and teh results were encouraging. These new light pages load four times faster and use 80% less data than before. Traffic to webpages increased by more than 50%.
Google has not a name for the new feature, which is primarily targeted at emerging markets. It is not clear whether the service will be also offerd on phones other than those running the Android operating system.
Google's technique sounds similar to that used by specialized mobile browsers such as Opera Mini, which route mobile browsing sessions through a proxy server where pages are compressed.