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.
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.