Yep, not much logic in this article. 'All of this on Google's dime'? ZNope, it's all on Amazon's dime, server-wise, and there's very little association between this supposed web-crawling effort and Android.
I think you're misinterpreting the original paragraph, which is admittedly quite terse, even telegraphic. Read the lines that follow:
they can intermediate user click through on Google search results so Google doesn’t see the actual user behavior. Google’s whole play of promoting Android in order to aggregate user behavior patterns to sell to advertisers is completely subverted by Amazon’s intermediation.
Google's business model is to spend a metric ton of money on servers and software in order to deliver a better search engine than anyone else. They do so in order to attract users. Part of the payoff is that Google gets detailed data on user behavior -- what they search for, what they click on -- and uses that to increase their value to advertisers.
Well, now Amazon has a brand-new potential business model: They've put a man in the middle between the customer and Google. They serve the customer the search results that Google is paying to generate, and they capture all the same data about customer behavior that Google gets. To the extent that Google's tracking data has any value, Amazon has just acquired that value, all in exchange for merely proxying a search engine that Google builds and maintains "on Google's dime".
Of course, any browser vendor could do the same. But if Apple built a phone-home feature into Safari that uploaded your clickstream (including, perhaps, the decrypted end of your SSL connections?) directly to Apple headquarters they would be roasted alive -- rhetorically, anyway -- by every geek on earth. Presumably we should give the same scrutiny to this move by Amazon.
