You may have a favorite search engine. Do you prefer Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, or maybe some niche engine no one knows about yet? If you do have a favorite, chances are you have downloaded that search engine’s toolbar. What you may not know is that once you download that toolbar, in exchange for the ease of searching from any internet page you are on, you have agreed to allow personal tracking of the web sites you visit and what terms you use to find those sites. This data is then used in many ways. One such way is to increase the rankings of sites you visit via keyword reference. The search engines will assume if you have visited a site based on a search, those sites are relevant to your search. With the tool bar though, the search engines can also track how long you stay on a site and use your online behavior as an indication of the usefulness of a site.

I would have thought that with the proliferation of these toolbars and the ease in which they can be added to your browser of choice, more people would be using them. However, ComScore has reported that of all web searches out there, only 12% are originating from a toolbar. This number is bound to change significantly with the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. The current beta version has a Google toolbar built in. This must be the result of some settlement in one of their anti-trust cases, or surely they would have added an MSN toolbar. In either case, it will not be long before user behavior becomes a major aspect of the new social search environment, and a major factor in the ranking of web sites for key word phrases.