Does Google Have Issues With Firefox Prefetching?

Ever since the release of Google's Web Accelerator tool, there have been many who follow the search engine industry questioning the purpose and the effects of prefetching. For those who are unaware, prefetching is according to John Battelle discussed the outcry against Google's prefetching practice. The biggest complaint has to do with the fact that prefetching can skewer site log statistics, which measure who and when a user visited the site, among other things. Because of the method Google uses to prefetch data, site logs can show site hits where none occurred. For a number of reasons, some consider this to be poor practice on Google's part. Battelle's article contains an excerpt from a post by privacy advocate Google's defense of their prefetching methods lies in the fact that their actions comply with current web standards and they only prefetch the first search result. Google says they are doing so to speed up the web for their Firefox users and that they are only taking advantage of technology existing within the Firefox browser. As Battelle's article indicates, webmasters can always filter out prefetch requests and users can also turn the procedure off, which is explained by Murdok. Visit Murdok for the