How will this affect web analytics? Let's say that Google chooses to prefetch the #1 result for any given search term. Will the #1 ranking site's analytics package report a unique visitor for every time that query is searched? If so, that would be a serious problem for those who rely on analytics.
It shouldn't affect Google Analytics and other JavaScript based analytics, but from the article,
* If this becomes popular it has the potential to skew logs and stats. Consider what happens when a bunch of prefetch requests are made to one of your pages, but the user never actually visits the page. The server (or stats package) doesn’t know the difference.
To clear this up, Firefox sends along an HTTP header, X-moz: prefetch, but you need some logic on the server side to detect it.
Do you just count the prefetch for what it is... a "maybe" page view. Or when the browser shows the prefetched page can it send a "view" (or load it again in the background - but that seems wasteful).
Good point, it wouldn't affect javascript based stats, but it's surely going to mess up with webserver log-based analytics such as webalizer, awffull etc..
