econman - 1:19 pm on Apr 10, 2006 (gmt 0)

Interesting thread.

One tiny bit of evidence suggesting that Google may already be using user data more than we realize:

We have a domain that we use for operational purposes. If you were to visit this domain, you would just see a splash page indicating the site is under construction. However, for various internal purposes we access this domain quite actively.

Perhaps as a result of our activity, I recently noticed the splash page has an Alexa ranking of roughly 100,000.

What is interesting is that the splash page also has a google PR of 5, despite having no inbound links that I am aware of, and despite the fact that Google, Yahoo and MSN all indicate it has zero inbound links.

Perhaps the PR 5 is due to our internal visits to the domain, using browsers that have alexa and/or google toolbars installed?