That's great. Now, how can I opt-out my web server from this?
Think of it like an iframe. Any page can already trigger pageloads of your page that the user might not had intended.
It's a bit different though when the biggest fucking site on the internet joins in.
Why should I be forced to expend bandwidth every time Google decides a page on my server is relevant to a search result? This could double or even triple my bandwidth costs.
What? Use robots.txt and exclude yourself from the Google index. It's not like they're preloading the first 200 results for obscure searches. If you're one of the top few results for a very active search then I'm sure someone else is more than willing to take over if you can't handle the load.
If you're worried about the technology itself being abused to DDOS people, I don't see how it enables any attack methods that didn't already exist.
I guess I should give Google more credit, and assume they're not idiots.