A week or two ago, Nelson and I were chatting about our blogs’ respective visitor logs. We found that we were getting people from Google visiting with weird referrers; that is we saw people going between our blogs randomly. Anyways, we finally hypothesized that it was some prefetch feature of the Google Toolbar which guesstimates which link you will click next, and starts downloading it.

I was upgrading Firefox to v2 on Pauline’s laptop (like a few months too late) and went to look for the site I linksblogged to remove some of the Firefox annoyances. One of the other points is this:

Firefox has this wacky little feature that downloads pages from links it thinks you may click on pages you view, like the top result on a page of Google results. This means you use up bandwidth and CPU cycles and store history for web pages you may not have ever viewed. Creepy, eh? To stop that madness, set the network.prefetch-next key to false

So maybe the weird behaviour we’ve been seeing is this, althought that doesn’t explain why the visitors are coming from Google IPs.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: firefox, geeky, google