Maybe they are hoping that webmasters will only bother configuring google since they have the best tools. Therefore meaning google out performs competitors even more.

I think the cut between the purpose of Webmaster Tools and Analytics is starting to become clearer, but I would still like to see more detailed statistics on Webmaster Tools for hits, etc.

In some cases, if Google just went ahead and automatically used images in Google Image Labeler without asking the owner, I bet they'd get people complaining about copyright infringement... I think they're just trying to cover their backs.

Maybe Google should be entirely opt-in... or entirely opt-out – they should just pick one of the other and stick to it.

I guess that could be true, Tony. But if you think of it like that, isn't the whole of Google copyright infringement? That's what Google News was done for recently, wasn't it?

Tony but what's the difference between Google image search result thumbnails where they don't ask? And if you really want to exclude them from indexing your pics, there's the robots.txt... which works across all search engines, too.

I agree with Mambo... I would like to see more details about my site on Webmaster Tools. When I use it for the first time, I felt a little bit disappointed with lack of information.

Their statistics are very empty and almost no useful information at all. For example, the pagerank section does not tell me which page have those page ranks, it just gave me vague information like "you have low page rank distribution this big |----------|, and you have med page rank distribution this big |--|"

I feel that the Webmaster Tools is incomplete and still have a long way to go.

Damn it, i just blogged about it and wanted philipp to get the notice.
Great Tool Crawl rate control.

I love these charts. It's always nice to visually see trends.

me too, but it's a bit confusing that the crawl charts are under diagnostics, but all the other crawl stats are under Statistics. I think the charts should be moved to be under stats too

I thinkn it is confusing they claim they havent crawled my site but I know it is indexed...