[mkjones]

I'm not sure either, but I doubt that Chrome or any of the badware-stopping features that are built in to it cause the URLs they're checking to be indexed. I'd be even more surprised if Firefox did this.

If you've got the toolbar installed though, I'd be less surprised if they tried crawling or indexing URLs you go to.

EDIT: It looks like they've explicitly said the toolbar does not cause things to appear in search results: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-toolbar-indexing-12894.ht....

[elliotanderson]

At least in terms of malware detection, Chrome utilises a bloom filter in the first instance to identify the probability of a URL being malicious before making remote calls. If it is found to be positive, only then does it submit it to Google for more precise verification.

1. http://blog.alexyakunin.com/2010/03/nice-bloom-filter-applic...

[lazyjones]

> EDIT: It looks like they've explicitly said the toolbar does not cause things to appear in search results

I read this too after posting, but I'm skeptical. It wouldn't be the first time they claimed to not do things they later admitted doing ... The rationale being that search engines need a way to discover new URLs quickly and keep ahead of the competition (indexing speed and breadth).

I'd also like to know what exactly Google Desktop Search does with URLs it finds.

[Evbn]

You could make a good bit of easy money if you can prove your suspicions. But since you haven't...