Google Personalized Search. That's not new. http://www.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=1593&hl=en
In this way people wont come back. I mean to say that visitors may see that they have already visited the website and they may try to find some other site for their search.
I agree, I've never liked the idea of 'personalized' visit counts on any directory. People are more likely to be given the impression from the counts that since they've been to your site before they should try another now--lost traffic.
Yeah it's just your visits and answers the questions yes they are tracking what you do. Data is money