Boot up: Google v Android (yes), Swartz v pleas, where musicians make money ... - The Guardian (blog)

[With Google Now,] Google is giving you useful titbits, but it is also mining far more data than it would get from a PC user - data to improve search relevance and advertising relevance.

In other words, Android, like Plus, allows Google to tie searches and advertising to individual people and places. In the long term, the data that Google gets from Android users is probably just as important as Pagerank in understanding intent and relevance in search.

Hence, the real structural benefit to Google from Android now comes from the understanding it gives of actual users, and the threat comes from devices that do not provide this data - even if, like the iPhone, they do provide plenty of search traffic.

Obviously, Google's access to this data on non-Android platforms is pretty partial, but the problem also applies to significant parts of the Android base. In China the problem is near-absolute. Google services are mostly blocked anyway, almost all Android phones ship with no Google services installed (i.e. they are based on the open source AOSP version of Android) and hence Google gets close to zero practical benefit from the explosive growth of Android there...

To put that another way, Google's penetration of Android is as important as Android's penetration of the handset market.