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I've questioned the limits of bots vs. browsers for awhile now, you make some interesting points. All along the way when G tried to differentiate crawlable websites with accessible ones, maybe they were all one in the same. Have you posted your piece on headless browsers yet? Might also be good here.
Google has said in the past that it built Chrome to make the web better, that's all they say they are trying to do and I believe them. Using a browser as a spider sounds like a good idea, but how are you going to separate private data (for example when you are logged in to a website) from publicly available data? It would just be too hard to do. I don't see spiders evolving in this way.
Read the EULA for Chrome.
Also, wouldn't privacy advocates freak out? Seems a risky proposition re lawsuits, gov't intervention, etc.
There has to be someone who can dissect this and see if there is any information being transmitted, however in the end I am very inclined to agree with this article, why wouldn't they?
I think you guys might have missed the point. Josh's article is not so much about Google using everyone's copy of Chrome is a distributed crawler that indexes the web although they do leverage your usage data in some form. It's more about Googlebot being a headless browser. Check out my "Just How Smart Are Search Robots" post for more info - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/just-how-smart-are-search-robots