Doesn't the Google toolbar do essentially the same thing they are saying IE is doing?
Edit: I did some digging to see if I could find an authoritative source on this, and found that Matt Cutts specifically denies this particular usage of user data for expanding the crawl set on his blog. Mea maxima culpa.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/
Edit the second: An amusing note on this general subject: Google will fuzz test certain search forms on, e.g., high value government websites to get at the juicy data behind them which would not otherwise be reachable from just traversing the link graph.