Via Cameo Wood, I found out why it is that I’m occasionally getting unexpected requests to set a cookie for other sites when I search in Google—it’s because Google is now using the “pre-fetch” functionality in some browsers (like Firefox) to automatically load the first result in your search in the background, whether or not you click on the link.
This is annoying for several reasons. First of all, if your company is monitoring where you go on the net, it makes it look like you’ve gone to that page—the page is in your cache, the cookies are set on your computer, etc. Second of all, it messes up the logs on that site’s server, by making it look like you went to their site from a Google search even if you didn’t click on the link.
The Google FAQ on this “feature” does tell you how to disable it in Firefox or Mozilla:
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