To be honest, I'm getting sick of everyone over-reacting to this feature. I can see that there are some good suggestions being discussed – like how there should be some way of opting-out using a meta header or robots.txt – but comparing it to Microsoft's smart tag feature (and some suggesting it's the start of a downhill decline for Google) is a little over the top in my opinion.

For a start, when I installed this version of the toolbar this feature didn't magically start to add links to pages I visited – instead, I had to click the "AutoLink" button for it to add the links to the page I was viewing. Surely, any user doing this is fully aware of what they've just done... and if they're not, then they're the only ones to blame – not Google. What's more, the cursor icon changes and there's even a tooltip to say it's a Google Toolbar AutoLink!

People seem to be forever waiting for Google to screw things up, and at the first hint of something produced by Google that's not perfect, they go wild! It wouldn't surprise me if people hate Google as much as they do Microsoft a few years down the line.

We like new companies when they're cool and cult-like, but when they get more popular we throw them to the lions and wait for a new one to come along...

Very valid points. I updated my post.