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Investigate whether KaiOS web traffic decline is due to Google Web Light
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Description

One remaining hypothesis for the long-term decline in KaiOS web traffic is that KaiOS is still being widely used, but some type of proxy is preventing its pageviews from being counted in traffic statistics (both our and those of Statcounter and Device Atlas).

Our leading candidate is currently Google Web Light, although it's not clear what evidence it leaves on our servers when it's used. Google's page states: "the Web Light user agent is used only for explicit browse requests of a human visitor, and so it can ignore robots.txt rules", which suggests that Google does make server-side requests corresponding to client requests. However, it might be that after a first request for a page, requests from other users for the same page are cached, so we still can't get a full picture of Google Web Light use.

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Event Timeline

nshahquinn-wmf renamed this task from Further investigate decline in KaiOS web pageviews to Investigate whether KaiOS web traffic decline is due to proxies like Google Web Light.Sep 14 2020, 10:29 AM
nshahquinn-wmf added a subscriber: AMuigai.

@AMuigai is currently checking in with others at the Foundation to see what they know about Google Web Light and whether we can gather any data about it.

nshahquinn-wmf renamed this task from Investigate whether KaiOS web traffic decline is due to proxies like Google Web Light to Investigate whether KaiOS web traffic decline is due to Google Web Light.Sep 14 2020, 10:46 AM