Sincere apologies, Google...

Got some quick feedback on my post about Google setting Third Party Cookies.

Thanks to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch (via John Battelle) who set me straight with his post revealing that its Firefox prefetching the first listing in the search results. Google takes advantage of the Firefox/Mozilla feature that prefetches the first search result.

Clever feature I guess. But I'm going to turn it off.

Google says in their FAQ on prefetching that:

With prefetching enabled, you may end up with cookies and web pages in your web browser's cache from web sites that you did not click on since prefetching happens automatically when you view Google search results pages. You can delete these files by clearing your browser's cache and cookies

Apparently, this feature was launched back in March and discussed here at news.com. I guess I just missed it....