I wasn't able to recreate it, but I've inspected my browser history* and determined that the URL of the Google search seems to have been mangled - it included 2 search strings. The URL was like follows, where "test123" was the prior search string, and "test456" was the current search string displaying in the Google search box:
It looks to me that the URL got mangled at the position #sclient. Maybe that is why it includes both search strings instead of only one. I found another similarly mangled search string in my history. That one even had 2 "q" parameters, plus a "pq" parameter, plus a "oq" parameter, all of which seemed to be phrases I had searched on today.
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chiming
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Date: 2011-06-26 10:57 pm (UTC)From:http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&hl=en&tab=lw&q=test123#sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1267&bih=662&source=hp&q=test456&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=27b93cf21etc
It looks to me that the URL got mangled at the position #sclient. Maybe that is why it includes both search strings instead of only one. I found another similarly mangled search string in my history. That one even had 2 "q" parameters, plus a "pq" parameter, plus a "oq" parameter, all of which seemed to be phrases I had searched on today.
http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&hl=en&tab=lw&q=test123#hl=en&pq=test234&xhr=t&q=pyrun.exe&cp=5&pf=p&sclient=psy&source=hp&aq=0&aqi=&aql=&oq=pyrun&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=27b93cf21etc&biw=1267&bih=662
I haven't been able to find a page with exhaustive info on all the possible parameters in the Google search URL.
That explains how the tomshardware.com page got my prior search string - it just pulled the value of the first "q" parameter out of the referring URL.
*This utility: MozillaHistoryView came in handy. It displays the history better than Firefox 3.6 does, when the same page was opened multiple times.