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Prefetching, huh? That certainly makes sense. Now I guess the decision is whether I'm more interested in performance or privacy. Hmm...
To me, those goals are not at odds with each other. By turning off prefetch, you avoid the cookies, and you also avoid the background HTTP request, which is pulling down links that you haven't yet decided you want to visit. Now, maybe for your tamales example, it just so happens that what you were looking for ended up being the first link, but more often than not, for me anyway, it's rarely that simple.
From what I've seen, they seem to only use prefetch for the top result, and not all the time, only when they've decided you're "probably" interested in that link based on your query. Thing is, if you really are going after the first link, isn't it just saving you the second or so it takes you to click that link?
Google usually does the right thing, but I think this prefetch business is a flat-out bad idea that needlessly increases traffic usage for both clients and servers, with very little benefit. But maybe I just don't "get it."
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