Nov
5
There’s been some speculation as to why Google Adsense would be paying $1 a head for referrals who install Firefox with Google Toolbar.
In addition, if you are a U.S. publisher, for Firefox with Google Toolbar referrals we will pay up to $1 per referral the first time a user installs Firefox. (We hope to make this available soon to international publishers.)
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/11/have-you-heard.html
There can be no other logical conclusion I can think of but that they want to increase the usage of Firefox with the toolbar enabled for prefetching purposes.
What is “results prefetching,” and how does it impact my site?
On some searches, Google uses a special tag supported by Firefox and Mozilla to instruct the browser to download the top search result before the user clicks on the result. When the user clicks on the top result, the destination page will load faster than before. This tag is only inserted when it is likely that the user will click on the first link.
For example, when a Firefox user searches for [stanford], Google includes the following tag in the results HTML:
link rel=”prefetch” href=”http://www.stanford.edu/”
The official Mozilla Link Prefetching FAQ describes the behavior of this tag in detail.
Prefetching may impact your site because the prefetch request will happen whether or not the user clicks on the result, so it may result in additional traffic to your web server. Google only inserts this tag when there is a high likelihood that the user will click on the top result, but clearly this heuristic is not right 100% of the time.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#prefetching
It’s my guess that there may be a saving in processing costs over the long haul, aside from all sorts of statistical benefits for them.