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And today I saw a management consultant using a toolbar! I was curious so I talked to her and she apparently doesn't know 70% of functions of it, but does use it for searching...
I wonder how wide-spread is the toolbar...
Well it does phone the mothership to tell on you. There have been a couple of people posting how they have had Google through a site that is brand new, no links in or out, and which should therefore be unfindable
If you use the site search you can find some good threads about the toolbar, but check this one [webmasterworld.com] particularly
In short, I think that if you are an SEOer without domain farms, or sneaky-sneak techniques to hide, you should be fine. If you are a hardcore affiliate whiz, or you have a domain farm maintained for boosting client PR, perhaps you should keep the toolbar on a "clean machine" that gets a regualr rebuild
It basically says - hey we are watching you - everything you do - and just wanted to let you know.
Without the toolbar - google knows every search you made, and when you made it.
With the toolbar, they know all that, plus everything you click on - every place you go, even your passwords and other queries you make in many cases - as they are in the url.
That being said - the toolbar is great, it would be nice if people could "delete" the ir history - "delete the last 24 hours" or things like that.
Once google comes out with their custom SERP - it will be VERY useful.
Only if you have a non-infected IE installation. Opera IDed as IE doesn't get offered it, but then I'm not sure how good a match for the genuine IE UA Opera gives. Anyone got a full UA spoofing browser they could test it with?
I have the Toolbar running whenever I'm using IE (quite often at the moment) but usually go to www.google.com to search (as it's linked from my start page and my Toolbar doesn't have a keyboard shortcut).
[root logs]# grep google access ¦ grep -v cache ¦ grep -v images.goog ¦ grep 'q=' ¦ grep -iv googlebot -c
1495
[root logs]# grep google access ¦ grep -v cache ¦ grep -v images.goog ¦ grep 'q=' ¦ grep -iv googlebot ¦ grep navclient -c
76
76/1495 = 5%
Good job Google. I hope that Google realizes exactly why they are having success and doesn't screw up like Altavista does.
Alex