# Google sending prefetch cookies

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2005-04-04T22:38:38Z


CameoGoogle & Firefox == Evil & Annoying

I recently did a search at google for "radio shack". To my surprise, I received a cookie setting request from radio shack.com. This had never happened before- and radio shack also happened to be a sponsored link. I did other searches, such as "ford", "sony", and even "girl scouts"- and each time, the top link requested a cookie to be set. Since Girl Scouts did not have a sponsored link- I realised it must only be the top link that sets a cookie. It turned out that Mozilla browsers (that includes firefox) and Google have both enabled prefetch- although it would seem that Google only recently enabled it- as this is a new occurrence. I always verify the setting of cookies- so this makes every google search into an annoying cookie refusal time waste. It would also seem that prefetching is turned on my default in firefox- and is very unintuitive to turn off.

So- for my friends that automatically accept cookies- you are now downloading a page and a cookie nearly every time you use google and firefox together.

And even though I never clicked on their link- and never wanted to visit their site- I'm downloading the top link of my search results to my harddrive every time I do a Google search.

This makes me dislike not only Mozilla- but Google as well.There is a discussion about this on WebmasterWorld.com as well. This feels annoying and since it's more fun to pick on Google than Microsoft these days, I'm blogging it.





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