Google pretty much knows (or can accurately estimate) exactly when a new document appears on the web and how many people are visiting it, they don't even need t

Google pretty much knows (or can accurately estimate) exactly when a new document appears on the web and how many people are visiting it, they don't even need to rely on second hand social signals for this. They control the web's dominant crawler (Googlebot), browser (Chrome, which sends everything you type in the address bar to them by default), ads (Adsense) and tracking (Google Analytics) platforms.