Can the toolbar be blocked?

[guynouk]

Does anybody know a way to have the toolbar installed so you can see a sites pagerank but at the same time stop Google from recording your surfing patterns and IP address.

Either that or does anyone know how to measure pagerank without having the toolbar installed?

Thanks.

[hakre]

that much i understand the toolbar ist it a deskband object for ie. that means, the toolbar runs in the same process as ie, so a desktop firewall can not detect her. there could be a possibility by filtering out the datatransmission to the specific google server which collects the data. you can do this simply by setting this host to localhost in your hosts file of your system.

but i have not installed nor analyzed which server google uses. but here are a plenty of guys who might even checked this.

[guynouk]

After 5 days and only one reply, I guess the answer to both my questions must be a resounding NO.:(

[mack]

the tool bar has to send info to google plex in order for it to return the page rank value. think of the RP meter as a browser. it sends a request to the google servers and they return an xml feed that displays the page rank for the site. IF you block it then the request will not be sent and no PR displayed.