Bill Hartzer said he spoke to Google's Matt Cutts at SES San Francisco a couple weeks ago, where he asked Matt if Google used Chrome browser data for search ranking or quality purposes. Matt told Bill that Google does not use Chrome data for search ranking or quality purposes.
Bill posted this in a WebmasterWorld thread saying:
Here on WebmasterWorld there have been some discussions regarding the data that Google is collecting via their Chrome browser. There have been some rumors and even a recent presentation from a former Googler that said that clicks on links from Google Chrome were more powerful than other links--because Google could measure that those clicks. (I can't find the exact URLs of those threads right now though.)I personally asked Matt Cutts about the use of Google Chrome data in the the Google organic algorithm.
We can now put this all to rest. Matt told me, in person, that Google's organic algorithm does not use any Google Chrome data. The same goes for the Google Toobar, as well.
There has been a lot of talk about Google using data from toolbars and others and Google has gone on the record about not using it. But despite that, SEOs do not believe Google.
In a recent poll we ran, most SEOs feel Google does share data from department to department to improve search quality and rankings - despite what Google says.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
