Why is my Node Express Mongoose app making get req

Question

I am running a Node (v 8.11.2), Express (with express-generator) and Mongoose app on a Ubuntu 16.04 server. I access it using AWS Cloud 9 service.

In the console.log messages I see that my app is making GET requests to these sites which are of zero interest to my code. What or why is making these requests?

GET http://www.baidu.com/?rands=_1989643718421222425724576 200 0.748 ms - 207
GET http://www.so.com/?rands=_144682544013674723168320 200 0.874 ms - 207
GET http://www.baidu.com/?rands=_860019281611321521293372 200 1.006 ms - 207
GET http://www.search.com/?rands=_14658606404382821623860 200 0.749 ms - 207
GET http://www.so.com/?rands=_579087861617667724519440 200 0.783 ms - 207
GET http://azenv.net/ 200 1.505 ms - 207
GET http://www.ip138.com/ 200 1.403 ms - 207
GET http://boxun.com/ 200 0.999 ms - 207
GET http://www.wujieliulan.com/ - - ms - -
GET http://www.123cha.com/ 200 0.744 ms - 207
GET http://www.epochtimes.com/ - - ms - -
GET http://www.minghui.org/ - - ms - -
GET http://www.ip.cn/ 200 1.078 ms - 207
GET http://www.search.com/?rands=_298542756025728303317028 200 0.806 ms - 207
GET http://www.rfa.org/english/ 404 2.094 ms - 1754