Hi Goog, where is your user agent?
December 8th, 2008 by yairb, Filed under: Google
Net Applications reported this week that one third of the traffic coming from Google’s facilities has no user agent. This report refers specifically to the traffic coming from Google’s employees and not the Search Engine’s traffic.
Vince Vizzaccaro, a senior executive from Net Applications said that they had never seen an OS stripped off the user agent string before. “you have to arrange to have that happen, it’s not something we’ve seen before with a proxy server.”
So what’s Google hiding? Of course, Google, like Google wouldn’t comment on rumors and speculations.
What do you think? Why would they hide their UA?
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All their employees are manually spidering the web with wget.
How about because websites that arbitrarily filter based on UA OS should die. (looking at you live.com)
They are Google, they can technically do whatever they want. Pun intended =)
Many possibilities:
- They just don’t want nobody to relate them with certain browsers.
- They might be trying hide the fact that some employees still prefer Firefox rather than Chrome.
- It could be part of a strategy to keep their own traffic off the stats or to avoid targeted malware.