Last week Google released Google Accelerator, a Windows program that speeds up bandwidth connections by precaching websites and sending http requests through Google servers. Initial reaction generally characterized the program as a Trojan Horse that solved a non-problem (do bandwidth connections really need more speed?) while enabling Google to collect lots (more) data on users.

But eWeek reported on Friday that the program was breaking at least a handful of sites, in some cases displaying pages as generated for other users.

"It is an unfortunate problem, but it looks worse than it is," Marissa Mayer, Google director of consumer web, told eWeek. "We are caching those pages on the server side with the user name on them…You see it, but it's important to point out that you are not logged in as that user and you do not have the session cookies needed to perform operations as [that] user."

Mayer blamed the problem on the sites' mis-implementation of their HTTP cache-control headers. Accelerator ignores links in URLs that appear after a question mark, assuming the URL is performing some function rather than pointing to actual content. "It could be that our assumption around the question mark and the way sites comply with the standard is incorrect. If that is the case, then we'll have to redesign the prefetch algorithm," Mayer said.

Beyond the technical glitches, there were some interesting theories about Accelerator. Dudu Mimran sees it as a classic "the network is the computer" play. He wrote on Strategic Board Blog: "Web applications ... were always inferior to desktop applications due to lower response times as well as richness of UI. Microsoft ... have always used this fact as a basic competitive edge ... for deepening their foothold in every computer uses. The gap of response time and application diversity is closing in and Google's effort to make this gap narrower ... creates a situation where users have a new alternative of Google applications vs. locally installed applications."

At O'Reilly Radar, Marc Hedlund thinks Eric Schmidt is starting to look like The Simpsons' Mr. Burns: "My proposed business model for Google Web Accelerator: replace all those Gator -- err, Claria -- ads with Google ads. Turnabout is fair play, after all! Eggscellent."