I have been wondering about something recently in regards to directories in particular... info: cache: site: As we know, these are a few operators you can use with g... Now in general, the person who throws up a personal homepage or maybe a small business web page would never know about or even care about these operators. I am wondering if g uses the fact that some of us webmasters are using these operators to gage who are keeping an eye on their stats and possibly flag the site for closer scrutiny. The same may very well be true for multiple PR checks on several popular data center checkers. I could be way off base here or maybe I'm just paranoid but just maybe I am correct. It could be a good experiment to start a new site, promote the hell out of it, and never use those operators to check it.
I dont think your paranoid at all, dont google already or shortly will plant a cookie that really does spy big time on your searches, so that they can serve up relevant personalised results. For personalised results they have to know what your doing, and when they know what your doing and why your doing it they can then act on that information. Anything could be happening.
I don't think your paranoid because I am sure Google do check up on abusers of such commands.... but lets not forget all of these commands are linked within Webmaster tools so anyone using it will likely have seen them, not to mention all of the SEO's who probably use them... sure small business owners might not but their SEO firm might be.
When you sign that eula to install that gaygle toolbar, you give gaygle full rights/permissions to your pc (e.g. everything on that hard drive) and allowing them to grab whatever info they want. So whether you use those commands or not, gaygle already has one-up'd you; knows where you go, what you do and search for online, regardless of what operators you use.