Google have just announced in their blog that searches done in firefox will prefetch the first result. From the Google help page on results prefetching:
On some searches, Google automatically instructs your browser to start downloading the top search result before you click on it.
This is a cunning idea, but I can see two major problems to it:
Privacy violations: by analysing logs, others will be able to see what a person is googling for, even if the person intentionally did not visit the actual page returned in the Google results.
Bandwidth: some providers (for example BT Broadband) give a very meagre allowance per month for network traffic. Conceivably a person doing a lot of research with Google could find their network usage spiking. Far-fetched, but possible.
The Mozilla link prefetching FAQ addresses the latter concern quite reasonably by pointing out this is already achieved through other browser hacks. Better to do it cleanly and openly than through obfuscated javascript.
I'm not quite sure how you handle the privacy issue: I guess it's time to assume privacy is not an option?
Posted by savs at March 31, 2005 10:06 AM