Sarad:

...

http://www.net4nowt.com/isp_news/news_article.asp?News_ID=2809

Google is way too fast. Whats the difference seraching using google in 10 milliseconds and in 5 milliseconds?Perhaps they are taking some load off their server? I fail to see how it is useful to the search client.

Peter:

They're not speeding up the search; they're speculatively pre-loading whatever the top result is into your browser, so if you click on it, that page comes up faster.

Firefox / Mozilla has a prefetching feature that you can turn on and off, which can occasionally speed up your next click by prefetching, so the page(s) you're most likely to read next are loading in the background while you're reading the page you're on. What Google's doing is including information in their results pages that Firefox recognizes as the page to pre-fetch next. This means that if Google's highest-ranked page is what you want, then you can get to it faster. Prefetching can make web browsing dramatically faster or slower. I tend to read online news by loading lots of tabs in the background, e.g. the interesting articles from Google New or NYTimes.com. That tends to be somewhat slow already, because Mozilla is a real memory hog, and prefetching would just make it worse. On the other hand, if it loads the *right* pages, it's really nice.