Website monitoring company Net Applications has discovered that around 30% of the traffic originating from Google HQ has identifying information stripped from the user agent string.

This traffic, which people are assuming is Google employees, has the operating system identifier stripped from the user agent string.

Speculation is that Google is testing a Google OS amongst employees:

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/stealth-googlebot-or-google-operating-system/1631/

Google has been using a custiomised linux distribution for employees for a few years, which it probably won't release.

Or is this something different?

Another blogstorm.in.a.cup, some website combing /var/logs/httpd for *INSIGHTS* that can be deduced on the flimsiest of (here – absence of) evidence. Of course Google is testing and/or running its own flavour of an OS, so what, exactly? And even were they to release it, which sounds downright stupid from commercial and every other point of view – where would you find the mirror massively parallell hardware that this OS is presumably customised for?

This was covered here via a separate thread, I don't find it just now however..

[moved ~ hebbet]

Was this observation covered earlier in December already:
http://mobile.forbes.com/device/article.php?CALL_URL=http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/05/google-operating-system-tech-enter-cx_ew_1205google_print.html?

Thanks hebbet, yeah, it was about two weeks ago.