Google Search Removes 'Mobile-Friendly' Label, Will Tackle Interstitials Next (venturebeat.com) 79
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today announced two updates to mobile search results: an aesthetic one rolling out now and an algorithmic one coming next year. The former consists of removing the "mobile-friendly" label in search results and the latter will punish mobile sites that use interstitials. The goal is to "make finding content easier for users," though as always, the company didn't share exactly how much of an impact users and webmasters can expect. The report adds: "If your site is in the 15 percent group, here's a quick recap. A webpage is considered 'mobile friendly' if it meets the following criteria, as detected in real time by Googlebot: Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash; Uses text that is readable without zooming; Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom; Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped. The company now wants to tackle 'intrusive interstitials' as they 'provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible.' After January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible when coming from mobile search results 'may not rank as highly.' Interstitials that Google doesn't like include showing a popup that covers the main content (immediately or delayed), displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content, and using a layout where the above-the-fold portion is similar to a standalone interstitial but the original content is inlined underneath. Interstitials that Google deems OK include legal obligations (cookie usage or for age verification), login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable, and banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible."
Mobile Web (Score:3, Insightful)
My phone has a large enough screen and a high enough resolution that I just prefer to browse the full site. Can we stop the "mobile web" shit?
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As long as you buy everyone a phone that's large enough for them.
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I know right. It's damn near impossible to ask the average web designer to create a website for both mobile and desktop. There are literally thousands of different user-agents out there and each has it's own specific screen dimensions. Find a better way, standardize some sizes. They won't do that because smartphone companies need to look different in order to separate themselves from the competition. If you think I'm gonna design for every single user-agent and dimension on the planet screw you. Your users can now enjoy zooming in on my website because I refuse to design mobile accessibility for every platform out there. It's too much bs to deal with. It's literally not worth the trouble in my opinion. Mobile has always been a headache.
I think you'll find the problem is that you're shit at your job.
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"Responsive" design is a wasp's nest of complicated, half-working, hacky CSS with javascripty shit on top . Unless your layout and content are brain dead simple.
Not all content works that way, and not all web sites can focus on style or presentation. Many websites need to get shit done and need to present a lot of content cleanly. And yes, sometimes we have to use tables!!
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No, that's not "responsive design". That's just a minimal design, which is great if you have minimal content. Responsive design means fucking shit up all over the place on different devices (based on resolution, browser strings, etc.). Sane navigation on a desktop site? It better be a javascript-enabled, overlaying shitshow behind a "swipe" action or a "hamburger" button on the mobile site!
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That's just a minimal design, which is great if you have minimal content.
There's a difference between "minimal content" and "minimal presentation." DJB may be opinionated and rude at times, but he's also a brilliant software engineer and cryptographer. I assure you, the content on his website is anything but "minimal" -- even if the presentation is minimal basic HTML.
It's unfortunate clueless "web designers" these days think something isn't meaningful just because it doesn't use a super-thin webfont (Open S
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Agreed.
But then our phones would probably explode under the pressure of fullscreen autostarating flash ads.
That and embedded java applets, fully interactive canvas elements, and millions of cross site activity trace pings.
Throw in some android specific attacks, and some other kinds of fun we don't know about yet, and it could be loads more entertaining to browse on a mobile device.
(I can hardly wait for the aggressive AR adverts of the near future.)
Re: Mobile Web (Score:1)
I despise the "mobile web" for the same reason you do. Also importantly, I LIKE being able to scroll horizontally and zoom. Almost every mobile site disables these core features. Almost none have an opt-out. Those that do require a manual reload or an account.
Personally, I'd like a browser in the app store that just always lies and is indistinguishable from a desktop browser. It's pretty much the only way this will ever work anyway- web developers are so relentlessly hostile that they ignore settings a
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I hate the auto load so much.
I'll be trying to compare products, and accidentally click something instead of opening a new tab, all if the sudden k need to scroll and let load and scroll and let it load, to get back to my place.
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As a webmaster, it's not that big of a deal to make a website using proper modern HTML mobile compatible. It's a matter of replacing the HTML tables(that we had to use last decade to keep our sites Internet Explorer 6 compatible) with CSS tables, and having a special mobile-friendly CSS file for people on mobile browsers. It took me about a day the last time I had to convert a desktop site so that it was mobile friendly; my new designs just have a second mobile CSS file.
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Re:Mobile Web (Score:5, Interesting)
The designers and page layout artists were horrified at this, and did everything in their power to subvert this model and return control of how the site would appear back with themselves. That's why flash websites were so popular in the early 2000s - it gave them complete control of how the site would appear, giving the user none. Gradually they've figured out ways to take away control from the user using regular html, which is why you now have websites where you can't zoom, can't resize fonts, everything is locked to three columns (menu, text, ads) which you can't move, resize, or rearrange, etc.
The way Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web, there would be no need for a desktop site or a mobile site. You just create one site, and it's up to the visitor's browser to format it in a way which makes it most usable on the display device. The need for different desktop and mobile sites only arises if you design your site so that it will only operate at a certain resolution or screen size.
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The way Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web
Is representative of the rest of the 80s and early 90s. We don't do anything the same anymore when it comes to design, layout, UI, or human machine interactions. The approach of not limiting a page to a specific display was ultimately quite limiting, so the web evolved.
The need for different desktop and mobile sites only arises if you design your site so that it will only operate at a certain resolution or screen size.
No. The need for different desktop and mobile sites arises out of ensuring the best kind of interaction between your user and your device without putting yourself into an incredibly limiting scenario involving serving up text and letting the
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My eyes aren't great and my fingers are fat, can we please have text readable at approximately the same apparent size and links that have reasonable bounding boxes across all devices?
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No, because the browser on your device does not adhere to any known standards (unless by accident), and the standards do not agree on how big "12 points" is on a mobile screen.
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As a (former) employee of one of, if not the biggest, news websites in the world, I can tell you their publisher said almost exactly the same thing. Mobile optimised tends to mean at best "laid out a bit differently" and at worst "crippled".
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My phone has a large enough screen and a high enough resolution that I just prefer to browse the full site. Can we stop the "mobile web" shit?
Mostly this is because sites (m.slashdot.org, and groups.google.com are the two that immediately spring to mind) cripple their mobile sites to the point where they are unusable (no "mark all as read" in groups.google.com, difficult to quote parent, javascript which actively works against editing your reply, and a login that only logs you in to half the site among other problems on m.slashdot.org)
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My phone has a large enough screen and a high enough resolution that I just prefer to browse the full site. Can we stop the "mobile web" shit?
Yes. Can all of it, starting with Slashdot's own mobile site.
what if they serve two versions? (Score:1)
I've seen plenty of desktop-focused sites that return one thing to the googlebot and another to normal browsers. E.g, they present a page to google that contains MySearchTerm, yet this does not appear on the page returned to browsers. Or sometimes the content they claim to have is hidden behind a login page, yet the googlebot still points to the page for that term.
What's to stop them from doing the same with interstitials? Pretend to anything coming from google's IP ranges that there are none, yet have t
Market Power (Score:2)
Re:Market Power (Score:5, Interesting)
Google appears to be applying the rule to themselves.
The worst "interstitials" to me are the YouTube ads ("skip in 5 seconds"),
So by this policy, you can avoid the youtube ads by finding the video in Google search! ...
I just tried a whole bunch of video searches, and it goes straight to the video with no advert. But click another clip within youtube
Sorry if this is not news :)
It's about time Google did something about popups (Score:1)
It's about time Google did something about those full screen popups which pop up every time you go to some webpage, usually asking for your email address. It's annoying to start reading something and being interrupted by a popup which covers the entire page.
As an aside, I find Google's ads have become annoying enough I recently removed them from my pages [samiam.org], despite the minor financial hit. When a webmaster asked for text-only ads, Google used to give you only text; now they give you pictures and sometimes eve
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It's about time Google did something about those full screen popups which pop up every time you go to some webpage
You mean, like that shit from consent.google.com with the parent page whitened out with blocked scroll even if the consent thingy is prevented by a request policy?
i would think browser info that gets sent back (Score:2)
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I am thinking the same thing.
I just see this as Google flexing their muscles and weighting their search results to favor their own platform.
I browse the web in a standard PC web browser. I cannot stand browsing the web on anything else. To me, "mobile friendly" means "crippled"
Hopefully, mobile optimized searches are context aware and will only highly weight "mobile friendly" sites when searching from a mobile device.
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I'm pretty sure that's what they're doing, weighing rank on mobile devices.
Re: A don't disable zoom. (Score:1)
For what it is worth, I use this javascript saved as a favorite. On ios, you need to save ANYTHING as a favorite, then edit the title to something useful (like "Enable Zoom") and then change the link to this javascript mess:
javascript:document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D').setAttribute('content','width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=10.0,user-scalable=1');
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Why do mobile websites disable zoom, when zoom is most useful on mobile devices?
Probably because it's too easy to accidentally zoom when you're scrolling around and clicking on buttons and links. Perhaps such sites should have a permanent enable/disable zoom button or gesture.
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Probably because it's too easy to accidentally zoom when you're scrolling around and clicking on buttons and links.
You were great in Back To The Future, not so much in Teen Wolf.
Now to get rid of (Score:2)
"Congratulations! You have won a free iPad!" survey full page bullshit.
Answer this survey question first (Score:2)
Isn't it Google that powers the "answer this survey question to gain access to this news article" thing? I swear I remember seeing their logo on it.
They don't want to punish advertisers. (Score:2)
On the web, interstitials are web pages displayed before or after an expected content page, often to display advertisements or confirm the user's age (prior to showing age-restricted material). Most interstitial advertisements are delivered by an ad server. - wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Everyone but advertisers would prefer if sites with lame adverts before the content were punished. I hope to see this feature added to DuckDuckGo.
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I feel like you're being way too kind.
Someone else's ads ads (Score:3)
punish mobile sites that use interstitials.
Those ads, they're not Google's ads. They need to die.
A good start... (Score:5, Insightful)
Next up:
- Demoting sites that prompt you to install 'their mobile app'. This is just their desperate plea to get even more data from you. And given what Google and that desktop site gathers already, that's a pretty impressive feat.
- Demote sites that pop a notification request. I don't even know you, website, and you want into my circle of trust? Huh?
- And can we get an amen for punishing sites that pop up Android Virus/Malware Detected, Battery and Memory Optimizer, and any other free and fraudulent apps?
And with that, half the web dies. So sad.
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I wish they would just allow uBlock. You can run a version of AdBlock, but it's limited.
Dear effing Idiot Webmasters... (Score:3)
Puh-h-h-lease...
Stop playing games trying to identify the user agent and sending to different pages,. Mozilla has gone off the deep end, and there are multiple forks of Firefox (I use Pale Moon). Many idiot webmasters try to match user-agent to one of the "big 3 or 4". If the match fails, they assume it's some weird mobile browser, and force even desktop browsers to the mobile site. If I specify "bad.example.com/", I want the desktop version, not the mobile version.
If you absolutely insist on doubling your workload, go ahead and create a separate "m.bad.example.com/", but please don't try to force users to it, because it probably sucks. A couple of "obligatory" cartoons for you...
http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/... [chainsawsuit.com]
https://xkcd.com/869/ [xkcd.com]
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So just change your UA to match one of the big 3 or 4...
Context (Score:2)
The report adds: "If your site is in the 15 percent group
What 15% group? If you're going to chop out paragraphs from an article, at least make sure they make sense by themselves.