[vash_stampy]

From the article: "Meanwhile, I’m on my third day of waiting to hear back from Google about just what exactly it does with its own toolbar. Now that the company has fired off accusations against Bing about data collection, Google loses the right to stay as tight-lipped as it has been in the past about how the toolbar may be used in search results."

And Google's sudden silence you don't find suspicious. This is the same company that invited the author of the original article to their headquarters the day after he wrote it.

[hristov]

If Google did the same thing with their toolbar, then Microsoft should be able to catch Google the same way Google caught Microsoft. Thus far they haven't although I am sure they are trying.

[abraham]

My recollection is Google has said several times that they don't use the toolbar tracking to effect search results. I can't find any sources right now though so I'm going from memory. One exception is tracking goes into personalized history which customizes search for that particular accounts results.

[varjag]

You suggest Google Toolbar collects Bing search results?

[vash_stampy]

Inadvertently like the Bing toolbar. It has been shown to log every pageview like Bing toolbar. Whether they filter out the pageviews when a user goes to Bing no one knows besides Google. (ie: The article below shows they definetly do not filter it out at the application level as a Yahoo query is sent back by the Google Toolbar and Yahoo now runs on Bing).

http://www.benedelman.org/news/012610-1.html

[abraham]

Logging pages views with the Google Toolbar does not mean those those views are used for Google's search results.

[Herring]

Well MS now knows how to perform this sting, so I'm sure we'll hear if their results show up on google. Until then, you have zero evidence.

[vash_stampy]

Sigh....Two things: 1) Performing this sting and it working or failing wouldn't prove if they did it in the past...The cat's out of the bag. Bing or Google could have easily changed their systems. (and I'm sure the way the two incorporate clickstreams into their search engine is VASTLY different)

2) More importantly, why would Microsoft need to prove google is also using clickstreams? Microsoft does not believe using clickstreams is wrong.

[zacharypinter]

> 2) More importantly, why would Microsoft need to prove google is also using clickstreams? Microsoft does not believe using clickstreams is wrong.

If they can make Google a hypocrite, the issue goes away. that's motivation enough for Bing to investigate the Google side (though I doubt they'd find much).

[Herring]

You cant make excuses for a lack of evidence. Like if you're caught copying someone's homework, you can't say "but nobody can prove he didn't also copy from me earlier". It's ultimately irrelevant; you can't conclude anything out of ignorance.

[gojomo]

Even if they don't collect and use Bing outclicks in their calculations... if they're using clicks, and load-times, and view-times, and order-of-visit information from third-party unaffiliated Google sites, including potentially sites with robots.txt blocks against crawling, then they're doing things almost entirely analogous to Bing.

[coderdude]

I believe Matt Cutts already stated that they don't use any click stream signals from their toolbar in their rankings. So much has been said about this that I haven't been able to find the quote. I may have even gotten wrong which Google employee said it.

[JoelSutherland]

He said they don't use Google Analytics data. He has also said that the toolbar doesn't affect the indexing of a page. I don't see anything about the toolbar affecting rankings though.

[coderdude]

Hmm... I don't think that's what I was thinking of. The wording was very specific. I don't recall Google Analytics being part of the comment, but of course I could be mistaken.

[gojomo]

Can you find a reference for Cutts or any other Googler saying Google Analytics data isn't used for search ranking?

[cma]

From what I heard, the end user agreement for Analytics says it won't affect rank.

[gojomo]

I can't find any such term. It's definitely not in the 'Google Analytics Terms of Service':

http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html

The 'privacy' link from Analytics leads back to the general privacy pages, and their overall privacy policy says Google may use any information they have (from logs, cookies, etc.) to "[p]rovide, maintain, protect, and improve our services (including advertising services) and develop new services".

[ot]

He always specified they don't use the click streams for the rankings. They may use them for crawling, to build test sets and many other things.