Script from googleapis.com

- Why does Google host these libraries?
The AJAX Libraries API came about because our team sat down and brainstormed how we could solve existing problems on the web that can only be solved by large companies such as Google — one of those problems is that the same bits from a few popular libraries are being grabbed millions and millions of times a day and it’s unnecessary. Google is uniquely positioned to serve large amounts of traffic from around the world at the fastest speeds so we decided that creating this API could help other sites as well as our own.

- Is Google using the referrer/IP for tracking users?
No. The API is not a devious plot to track users. Our intention was to help speed up the web and help with some of the chaos that we see in the wild. There are still plenty of sites that are not setting correct cache headers to minimize latency and don’t have the global deployment to ensure that users visiting from Europe see the same low latencies as those on the west coast of the US.

With that said, we do have logs of referrers, IPs, and user-agents. There is no user tracking, and these logs are subject to our 9 month anonymization policy (details at http://www.google.com/privacy.html). Our team uses these logs to understand the performance, adoption, and status of the system. These signals are used by us mainly for capacity planning purposes. Since we launched the API last year, we have expanded some of our operations and grown our capacity. The signals we get from these logs are directly responsible for our ability to meet the needs of the community and help ensure global, low latency access to the system.


- Does Google insert code into the libraries? Will they?
Absolutely not. We refuse to make any changes, trivial or not, to any of the libraries we host. You can verify this by downloading the libraries from us and the maintainers and do an MD5 checksum on them.
http://www.prototypejs.org/assets/2008/1/25/prototype-1.6.0.2.js
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js

Daniel Todorovski wrote:
Think about it. Why would Google host/give you code for free?

Daniel Todorovski wrote:
It's for tracking purposes. You're giving up your independence. Or maybe you (the staff) know about this, which makes it even worse?
Example

Colin wrote:
... I can, however, make a change that will force the inclusion of the javascript libraries from our servers just for your account.

Colin wrote:
Everyone should be getting Jquery from ProZ.com now.

Daniel Todorovski wrote:
tin foil hat man