Adobe Shockwave player is an essential piece of software for many people; as they need it to view shockwave animations on the net - and as anyone who spends any time online will tell you, the instances of Shockwave or Flash appearing online are legion and increasing at a rate of knots! Therefore, on many websites, many people will be prompted that they need to download this software to view what they are looking for. These countless numbers of people will now also be downloading the Google toolbar software onto their computers too. This is free to the user and arguably will be of no harm to the user - and there are plenty of potential benefits.
The installation of Google Toolbars on computers is more than useful to Google. The software allows Google to monitor how the internet is used and which WebPages are more popular than others. If every machine ran the Google toolbar, then Google would easily be able to determine the rank of all WebPages on the net, due to their traffic; and so be able to always give us the best results in its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
This major partnership is another major strengthening for Google; and takes it another few strides ahead of its competitors.
This partnership is also good for all internet users: the better Google is able to collect its data, the better its search results will be for us tomorrow and further into the future.
