TheMadScientist - 6:15 pm on Feb 2, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm just now reading the article... 7 or 9 of the pages they created and manually ranked for the study appeared in Bing. They do not say whether those pages were spidered by Bing or not... Wouldn't it be as reasonable since there were no results Bing used the data for discovery and then ranked the URLs where they should have been since there were no real content pages containing the term?

7 or 9 out of 100 doesn't seem like a very high percentage to me, in fact IMO it seems like a stretch...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding or misreading what they did... I don't have time to study it, but it doesn't seem like a very high percentage to me. 80% or 90% sure, it's pretty obvious then, but less than 10%?

“Absolutely not. The PageRank feature sends back URLs, but we’ve never used those URLs or data to put any results on Google’s results page. We do not do that, and we will not do that,” said Singhal. Actually, Google has previously said that the toolbar does play a role in ranking. Google uses toolbar data in part to measure site speed — and site speed was a ranking signal that Google began using last year.

And, has anyone ever had an unlinked page spidered while using the G Toolbar? They may not use Chrome or the Toolbar to 'put any results on Google', because they use GoogleBot and an algorithm to put results on Google.

I don't see where he says they don't use the data they have access to for discovery though...