Terence Tao has observed that, for any divisor $m\mid n$, \[\frac{\tau(n/m)}{m} \leq G(n) \leq \tau(n),\] and hence for example $\tau(n)/4\leq G(n)\leq \tau(n)$ for even $n$. It is easy to then see that $G(n)$ grows on average, and in general behaves very similarly to $\tau(n)$ (and in particular the answer to the first question is yes). Tao suggests that this was a mistaken conjecture of Erdős, which he soon corrected a year later to [448].