Does info gathered from toolbar contribute to PR?

I didn't think so, but

[umbria]

Someone who occasionally knows what he's talking about told me yesterday that the information gathered from the google toolbar contributes to PR. In other words, its browsing history helps google calculate page popularity.

I didn't think this was true. I'd always thought that PR was solely based on links to and from. Is my knowitall friend right? Have I missed something obvious in my browsing of these boards?

[Knowles]

umbria, welcome to WebmasterWorld! I have never heard of this and after a quick look at the Google Technology [google.com] page they didnt seem to mention anything like that.

[Brett_Tabke]

We've been "living with the question" for awhile now.

How would we test such a hypothesis?

[nipear]

This might explain the amazon.com surge I've seen in a lot of terms. Pages with PR2. You can't deny the alexa ranking model is a legit model. And I'm sure the P.H.D's at google can only improve on it...

Think of it PR based on links and unique viewers in a month. Tougher to SPAM the index...

[martin]

In the Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertext Search Engine they say that traffic statistics can affect the dampening factor of the page. I guess it doesn't alter the current page's PageRank but the linked to pages.