Their new browser will enable Google to collect information on what visitors do after they land on a site -- How many pages they visit, how much time they spend on each page, whether they bookmark a page as a favorite, etc. Does google use this kind of data as a factor in their rankings, or could they do so in the future?
Just speculation. But if you look how desperatly they collect and use all kind of data, it would realy surprise me if they would not use the data they get from Chrome.
They use it to make money, basically. they will use the info to figure out how to serve more relevant ads.
Google has already had access to this information for a long time. Has everybody forgotten about the Google toolbar? Do you not remember the disclaimer you have to agree to in order to display the PR in the toolbar? You basically have to agree to let Google use your data.
This is the reason google is such a big company now. its all about data, if they can figure out how we use the internet, you better believe they are going to figure out a way to optimise their income based off this information.
Which is why I never installed the tool bar. I never gave pr much of a thought anyway as I was outranking sites with higher PR than I had. Pr matters to webmasters, not customers.
I think no one knows for sure if user behavior affect SERPs or not. Only google knows about it. Anyway, I have seen many people saying that google do collect such data and they use it to change SERPs. But I am not sure if it really is true.