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For those who might not have downloaded it, the toolbar comes with an option to vote on sites. You can click on a happy face if you like the site and a sad face if you don't. Kind of a neat future.
I figure Google wouldn't collect this info unless they were going to do something with it though.
The only concern I guess that a person could have is that if it works like Alexa it might not be a great thing. I say that because Alexa's ranking for one of my sites, for example, flucuates so radically when compared with my steady web traffic reports that they must have a very small sample size using the toolbar. While two days in a row I might have 25,000 uniques according to Webalizer, Alexa might say I am ranked 15,000 and 65,000 on those two same days.
If a similar small group could vote on quality of sites and have that rank in google, would that be too much power in the hands of too small a group of people?
I don't know, and I'm not saying it is a problem, but I thought it was a topic worthy of being discussed ...
and on alexa: Think about what alexa is, it measures your traffic and everyone elses traffic daily, just because your traffic is steady on those two days doesnt mean that everyone elses is ;)
I know what you are saying about what Alexa is, but that is a really wide variance ... and I didn't mention that is says on one day I got 10.9 page views per visit and the next 1.4. That might make my point better, especially seeing as Webalizer says it is pretty consistant in terms of total page views. Things like this make me feel like their sample size sucks. I don't know for sure though of course... just from what I've seen. :)
If you select the voting bar, no such privacy warning appears. If it was really sending info back, it would have to warn about privacy as well.
IMHO the Vote Feature was included to make website owners who felt frustrated at their google ranking feel like they could do something about it.
According to a user study conducted by Google, they actually found that the "vote on this page" feature reduced the quantity email complaints about google page rank by 18%.
Oh, also, if you have speakers, when you click it, it makes your PC go "beep".
on one day I got 10.9 page views per visit and the next 1.4.the other thing you have to remember about Alexa (and i know this has ben lamented upon dozens of times on webmasterworld) is that it only measures traffic of people with the alexa toolbar, and apparently some versions of IE :S Not all traffic.
