Potential Problems with Google Web Accelerator

Jason Fried of 37Signals writes about some of the potential problems that Google Web Accelerator can cause in your web applications, due to the use of Prefetching within the product.

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since theyve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Heres the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page  including links like "delete this" or "cancel that." And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a "Are you sure you want to delete this?" Javascript confirmation behind that "delete" link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway. Disrespect.

We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were "disappearing". We were stumped until we dug a little deeper and discovered this Web Accelerator behavior.

Google Web Accelerator: Hey, not so fast

You should be able to use my code for blocking prefetch to solve this potential problem.

Between this, and their AutoLink feature in the google toolbar - Google is starting to get intrusive.