I’ve been using Google Docs for a while (and now have started with Apps), I’ve been toying with the idea of using GMail, this is a deal breaker for me.

Googled the ‘Google TOS’ and #2 was this http://www.webrampage.com/gmails-tos-is-freaky-unfriendly/

It’s no wonder they offer so many services for free, or next to nothing. Information is priceless.

‘knowledge is power, knowledge is riches…’

Here’s the link http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/static.py?page=privacy.html&hl=&v=

Not exactly sure what this means, but read on…

Certain optional Toolbar features operate by sending Google the addresses or other information about sites when you visit them. Web History, PageRank, and Safe Browsing in Enhanced Mode all work this way. In addition, if you use Safe Browsing, when Google warns you about a suspicious site we may also log that site’s URL and whether you accepted, rejected, or closed the warning message. We will let you know when you are enabling a feature that automatically sends page addresses to Google, and you can turn these features off at any time.

video > http://tinyurl.com/yomhcv

I am following up my tweet with this comment.

I’m running an experiment to see if Google indexes sites that don’t have any external inks better than those which do with a colleague at the moment. It appears that even with very, very few or no external links you’ll be indexed, and can even rank pretty well for very targeted keywords.

I don’t know if origin-www. has been submitted to GWT, but it has a sitemap at: http://origin-www.baltimoresun.com/sitemap.xml which is a pretty good way for G to find out the structure of the site even if it’s not how it found out about the site.

James

Stuart

I’m sure that Google has the ability to find unlinked domains in a number of ways.

As long ago as 6 or 9 months ago several of us here at TWM were working on a new website for a client and emailing each other (we’re a distributed business) with thoughts, ideas and changes. The URL went backwards and forwards a number of times.

At the time I was a bit surprised to find that Google had indexed the temporary home page about a week before it was replaced with the full-blown site.

Several years ago now Matt Cutts stood up at a conference and revealed that Google could track domains via some method that he never quite got round to explaining … but was probably via by looking at what domains are on the same IP addresses.

And I’m sure Google has several other ways of finding unlinked sites. So don’t be surprised that Google found your site – we’ve been working that knowledge into our search engine strategy for new sites ever since we stumbled on it with the site that we had been emailing to one another.

Stuart

It can be used for discovery… over various platforms (have a read, all makes sense)

Hope that helps some…. seems a likely direction to look.

My vote’s for the Google Toolbar. The other possibilities you describe seem unethical to me, I’d like to think Google’s not crawling links in personal browsing history, GTalk or Gmail.

However, I had a sub-domain indexed by Google recently that had no incoming links, and had robots.txt ‘all robots disallow’. Seems Google Toolbar was the likely culprit, I’ve seen Alexa find non-linked sub-domains this way, but the fact they ignored the robots.txt is disturbing.