[justlurking]

Be aware that you aren't effectively hiding your access to freerepublic.com, unless you are also controlling your DNS server access.

In order to find freerepublic.com, your desktop must do a lookup to get the IP address. That lookup is usually handled by a local DNS server, which only goes to the larger Internet root DNS servers if necessary.

Those lookups can be logged, including the requesting IP address.

Also, it isn't unusual for a company to install a transparent proxy server that intercepts every HTTP request that goes outside their firewall and check to see if the page is in cache. That can log everything as well.

[Celerity]

Thanks for the inputs - But I have no problem masking my activities here.

The question was really about how Google is now handling the request.