A percentage of Google traffic is stripped of identifying information. Why?

Lots of people here probably already understand this, but: User agents being stripped out says nothing about the OS, only the browser. The OS has no involvement in the user agent string. Most browsers happen to include an OS, but that is their choice, and they are free to lie.

My guess is that either Google has a critical mass of privacy nuts that use readily-available Firefox extensions that do this, or, probably more likely, that there are internal builds of Chrome floating around that have been programmed not to send their version number freely out. It means... nothing interesting whatsoever!

Speculation that Google was building a browser was obvious and flowed freely long before it was found to be true. Speculation that they are building an OS is the same, except it hasn't been shown to be true yet. Well, except the Android OS, which I'm sure there are NO PLANS WHATSOEVER to bring to the desktop in any form, ever. (I mean, obviously it can't be a straight translation, but...)

translated from the PR: We noticed something funny about some web requests from Google. Obviously this is evidence of a super secret stealth project that will cause Steve Ballmer to throw chairs. Buy our Data.

From the article:

"Its algorithms may be picking up on Google's robots that crawl and grab content from the Web, for instance."

Translation: they're not cleaning up their traffic data for the biggest source of traffic out of Google's HQ. They should just stop spweing BS and Forbes should get better reporters.

"'Google is the only company we've seen that does this,'" Vizzacarro says. Google employees not using the secret OS are employing various versions of Unix, such as Linux or Ubuntu, and some older operating systems, like X11, he says."

X11? Linux and Ubuntu versions of Unix? Wtf? This shit is embarrassing.

The article was dead in the water when it called X11 an operating system.