[cd34]

Netscape has provided support for prefetching for a while. The reason you could use more bandwidth is that if you have a page with 4 links, and the surfer fetches those 4 links in the background, and then doesn't visit them, yes, you are going to use extra bandwidth.

However, google says it also is a caching proxy, your bandwidth utilization will go down because google will serve it rather than you serving it.

The other thing that I am sure they are doing to make things serve faster is partial & multiple gets where they have 4 separate connections, each grabbing a different piece of the file. While there are 4 connections going, they still only download the file once. No real increase in bandwidth, but, the surfer uses 4 connections rather than 1 which can sometimes cause servers to exceed maxclients depending on the config.

I don't think it is as traumatic as people are saying -- its nothing that hasn't been around for years anyhow. Just that not as many people have quite the exposure or trust that google has and it might become much more prevalent, but, I really doubt it is going to change things too much.