Google publishes, every half hour and back to 2009, how much of the world’s traffic to each of its products comes from Iran. When Iran is cut off, every product falls at once; when Iran is put behind a whitelist, Search comes back and Gmail, Maps and Translate do not. Reading the products side by side is what tells the two apart.
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What Google’s numbers are, and are not
How to read this
- Iran’s share, not a count.
- For each product Google divides the requests it sees from Iran by those it sees worldwide, multiplies by a constant it does not publish, and adds noise. A value of 30 is not 30 of anything.
- Only against itself.
- The constant differs per product, so YouTube at 55 and Search at 9 say nothing about which is used more. Every chart here compares a product with its own usual level.
- World-wide changes cancel out.
- A global Google outage moves Iran’s requests and the world’s together, so the share barely moves; a loss in Iran alone shows fully. The daily wave is Iran’s day against the world’s day.
- Blocked products measure leakage.
- For YouTube and Blogger the series counts requests that reach Google from Iranian addresses anyway. People using VPNs appear under the VPN’s country.
- About 75 minutes behind, every 30 minutes.
- The collector reads the last three days every half hour, so a late or revised point replaces the stored one. Half-hour points are kept for 400 days; every Tehran day since 2009 is kept for good.
- Two references, two questions.
- The site’s verdict compares the five everyday services with their last 30 days, like every other source, and asks what changed. This page compares with the past year and asks what state access is in. The verdict leaves every day inside a shutdown found in this data out of its references, so a blackout never becomes its baseline; on this page a long blackout would start to weigh on the usual level after about six months.
- Unofficial access.
- The numbers come from the endpoint the Transparency Report’s own page uses. It is undocumented and could change; if its shape changes, the collector stops and says so on the sources page rather than storing nothing.
Source: Google Transparency Report — Traffic and disruptions to Google ↗ · Data: /api/v1/google, /traffic, /daily, /episodes · Methodology