Receptional_Andy - 10:37 pm on Apr 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

There are a few issues floating around in this thread.

If you publish a host to the Domain Name System, visit a URL via a search engine toolbar, or if a reference to the URL appears somewhere in the public internet, then that URL has a realistic chance of being added to the content discovery queue at a major search engine.

The only reliable method I'm aware of to prevent the content at a published URL making it onto the public internet is to authenticate users - ideally via a username/password combination, or otherwise by some other characteristic of the client - IP, for instance.

If you have a reasonable authentication mechanism, then search engines cannot access the content of that URL. The best they can do is request the URL and get denied.

is my customer-data really safe with the toolbar enabled?

The last time I checked, the toolbar sent URLs back to Google, not content from URLs. You can install a packet sniffer and check whether the same happens on your own computer.

For me, the bottom line is that if you publish a URL to the public internet, the either you verify users or consider the contents available to anyone - search engines included. If a search engine can get the content, so can anyone with an internet connection.

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 10:40 pm (utc) on April 22, 2009]