Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Does the Google Toolbar send my web history to the main Google cache for search results?
Maybe with the cache settings on maximum?
So, if I visit a web page that can only be reached through a valid form submission, will the google Toolbar add this page to the main search cache? So a page I visited will show up on someone else's search?
I know we can use the <meta> tag to stop robots but what if a site I visit doesn't have this tag?
If it can then this is an amazingly sneaky and perilous way of bypassing the limitations of the standard Google crawler ie; it can't guess form values
Google does apparently discover new urls from toolbar data. But those pages can't get into the index without a follow-up visit from googlebot. That is, the toolbar does not "spider" the page you visit and send all that data back to Google. Let's not give them any ideas, eh ;)
The question of whether the Toolbar is sending your web history to Google, and whether Google is using that information to crawl previously undiscovered pages may be two different questions.
I have a strong feeling that Google does track the urls you visit through the web. At the moment, I don't feel up to speculating on what they might be doing with that data. I can't rule out that they feed the data to Googlebot, but I don't know, and I suspect not.
Google has previously indicated that it's likely publicly available server logs are how Googlebot finds pages you've visited. There's a discussion on that topic here...
Why is Google indexing my entire web server?
[webmasterworld.com...]
Note, though, that the Google link regarding the "secret server" that I'd posted in the above thread has been redirected to an article about verifying Googlebot, and that a search for exact text in the original "secret server" article doesn't come up in a Google search. I hesitate to draw any conclusions from this, though others might.
