By Matthew Steele and Bryan McQuade,
PageSpeed Insights Team

At Google, we strive to make the whole web fast. Our work in this area includes PageSpeed, Google Chrome, and the SPDY protocol, among other efforts. In December of 2011, to make it easy for you to enable the SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”) protocol on your sites, we released an early beta of mod_spdy, an Apache module that adds SPDY support to the Apache HTTPD server. We’ve spent the last few months working with our early adopters to fix bugs and tune performance of the module. Today, we’re launching a version of mod_spdy that we encourage you to try on your web server.

Enabling SPDY for your site improves performance in several ways:

• The server and browser can compress HTTP headers, saving bytes on the network.
• Multiple resource requests can be multiplexed over a single TCP connection, saving connections on the network.
• The browser can request all page resources at once instead of a few at a time, which reduces the number of network round-trips needed between server and client.

A brief overview of recent changes to the Google Privacy Policy

Google’s gifts for us and for our customers

UPDATE: It turns out Pagerank is not dead after all. Google has simply updated the URL which is used to query it, which has caused various toolbars and websites to stop reporting the number. Dave Naylorspotted the update and has subsequently updated his own tool, which is now once again reporting PR accurately. The original article was as follows…

Watch this short video on ways to make your AdWords ads stand out from the crowd and attract even more customers to your website!

Rob von Behren and Jonathan Wall, Founding Engineers on Google Wallet, introduce the app that makes your phone your wallet. Learn more at http://www.google.com/wallet OR http://mashable.com/2011/09/20/google-wallet-review/ (Google Wallet: First Impressions)

Google has changed the way they handle reporting links within Google Webmaster Tools. Instead of considering subdomain links as external links, they are now considered internal links.

Is that possible? Well, a researcher with Identity Finder, Aaron Titus, believes so, since he says he managed to use internet searches to unearth a trove of unsecured private health records on a website, around 300,000 of them. He notified the company, Southern California Medical-Legal Consultants, which represents doctors and hospitals seeking payment from patients receiving workers’ compensation, and they say they have taken steps to secure the data. He states the data was, “available to anyone in the world with half a brain and access to Google.”