When did Google start forcing web pages at people without asking?
Haven`t posted a rant in the webolg in quite some time. Or posted anything for that matter. Life is busy. Busy little bee. Anyway, time for a small rant at google.
Always valuing the value of valuable bandwith, I run a squid proxy at home to cache the world in case it`s needed on another machine on the network. Anyway, tonight I was having a look at the squid log files and noticed something vaguely interesting after googling for Bruno Brookes. In the squid log was the following:
x.x.x.x – - [26/Jan/2006:21:39:43 +0000] “GET http://www.radiorewind.co.uk/bruno_brookes_page.htm HTTP/1.1″ 200 39607 TCP_MISS:DIRECT
For the uninterested, or non-squidded, it`s essentially a timestamp, a URL, and a file size for something that`s been downloaded. But did you actually want to download the file, and whatever cookies may have come with it?
Odd, thought I, as I hadn`t visted this site, and furthermore had absolutely no interest in visiting this site (I`m sure it`s a great site and all). I tried googling for some other stuff, and yes, the top result of the google was almost always pre-fetched, unless the search term was a bit ambiguous. Almost always. Why almost always? Why not always? Why ever?
No offence, but if I happen to be searching for bikini babes, I don`t particularly want porn (if that happens to be #1 match) pumped down my ADSL. In fact, I don`t want anything pumped down my ADSL without asking for it. What`s next? It`d be interesting to see people dragged to court for goodness knows what only to say `sorry guv – Google made it download, guv`.
I`ve tested this in Firefox 1.5 and IE 6 (ew), and so far it`s only occurred within Firefox; looking at the HTML, prefetch links are embedded, and only within Firefox. Is this another way to artifically drive up revenue by supposedly increasing traffic to sites without users even knowing? It`s bloody shady if you ask me – god knows what people are downloading without knowing.
Google – grow up. It`s not big, and it`s not clever. Let people click on your search results through choice, not to keep your share price at a stupid level. The prefetch attribute was never intended for this purpose. It was intended to allow prefetching within a site you`ve already elected to view, and we (the users.. rarrrrrrr) shouldn`t have to cock around with browser settings to disable out-of-the-box functionality. We also shouldn`t have to go clearing out cookies every 20 minutes in case some nasty little git has put 1000 trackers in a page – or worse, for example a z3r0 d4y xpl01tz LOLOLOLOL for firefox. Also, despite what google reckons, "the destination page will load faster than before" is complete bollocks. It`s already been downloaded at standard download speed. If anything, it slows things down if you`re not interested in search result #1
edit: having chatted with a few people it seems this functionality has been used for ages.. doesn`t mean it`s right though! time to try for #1 google matches and whack a few megs of shite in the file for prefetching…
/nips off to disable prefetching in firefox
here`s google`s positive spin on their mis-use of the prefetch feature:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html#prefetch
I`d link to the page, but it`s probably already been downloaded to your cache, and below a quite interesting bunch of posts on webmasterworld – you`ll need to click the URL once you get there
