I'm pretty sure Chrome send URLs to Google at least for indexing purposes. I've put up random pages on my websites, not linked to them anywhere at all but visited them in Chrome and then BAM - indexed soon after in search.
Chrome does not arbitrarily send URLs to Google. We go out of our way to avoid doing that, actually.
Look at the implementation of SafeBrowsing, for instance, which does some clever work with hashes to ensure that Google never knows exactly what URL you visited that triggered the warning. It would have been _much_ simpler to just send the URLs, I assure you.
Chrome, or Chromium? One is open source, one really isn't. The set of things that Chrome does is certainly based on Chromium, but Google certainly has the freedom to add some very useful tracking behavior... if they want to.
On one, we have source. On the other, we just have the quote "We go out of our way to avoid doing that, actually." What other evidence?
Given that I'm responding to "I'm pretty sure Chrome send URLs to Google at least for indexing purposes." let's first agree that there's been no evidence provided that I can respond to. :)
I mean both Chrome and Chromium. The source is there, we develop in the open, and I'm not sure what additional evidence I can provide to you to prove a negative. Wireshark?
Well the source for Chrome is not open (edit: correction acknowledged - I thought only Chromium was open), though if you are a Chrome developer confidently saying this is impossible then I would give merit to that. My experiences were non-scientific but still gave me enough suspicious to right this. I may try a more rigorous/careful/documented experiment sometime in the future.
The source to Chrome is definitely open and you can compile an effectively identical version yourself (minus the branding). There are some closed source plugins (eg. PDF and Flash) that are shipped as dynamic libraries. However, you could disable them (via about:plugins) or simply delete the corresponding binaries from a Chrome distribution and everything remaining would be open source.
When you say "effectively identical" do you mean all the preference defaults, all the Google service connection points, etc? Could I do a build from the Chrome source and get a hash match with the release build from Google?
When I had this happen, or when I heard this happen, there was always a reason that was far less sinister than initially thought.
* Public referrer logs created a backlink
* Somebody (else) published the URL
* Somebody (else) shared the URL
* You pinged the URL to search engines or other services.
* The URL appeared in your RSS feed
* The URL appeared in your sitemap
* Your pages URL ranges are easily guessable (/item.php?id=1007, /item.php?id=1008) and traversed by a search engine.
And more recently, something less innocuous: You simply added a Google +1 button to your pages.
When you add the +1 button to a page, Google assumes that
you want that page to be publicly available and visible
in Google Search results. As a result, we may fetch and
show that page even if it is disallowed in robots.txt.
IIRC, it has components of Google Toolbar built in. If you accessed those pages with a browser with the Google Toolbar you'd have experienced the same.
> When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to your default search engine so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for. If you choose Google as your search engine, Google Chrome will contact Google when it starts so as to determine the best local address to send search queries. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature as explained here.
...
> If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google so we can help you find the URL you were looking for. You can disable this feature as explained here.
...
> If you enable the optional AutoFill feature, which automatically completes web forms for you, Google Chrome will send Google limited information about the structure of pages that have web forms and information such as the arrangement of the form so that we can improve our AutoFill service for that page.
(end excerpts)
Could you give us more information about the AutoFill feature? Does it send the URL along with the listed information? Does it do this for every URL that contains a web form?
