Tom_Dalton - 4:36 pm on Feb 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

The whole push for personal identification of sites (required to use this tool, for instance) raises another privacy issue (again)... Some old discussions of WebPositionGold and other things like that point out that Google can't penalize your site even if you use tools they don't like because there's no way to connect the two. Now there is -- Google knows what you're searching for, what other pages you visit (if you use toolbar or the pages have adsense) and what site is your own.

Paranoia hat -- Google could start penalizing your site if you use Yahoo search too much! Or if you're looking up or visiting spammy link farm sites or affiliate programs they don't like.

Benefit hat -- this is a required step to starting true, use-based rankings of results. Identifying personal biases will help Google provide better results once they switch to a Netflix-style ranking algorithm.