Does that mean they'll block youtube? Try playing a video on a phone that does not have the youtube app installed, it's just about impossible to get it right, it's a roulette that's rigged with more than half the links going to the youtube app page on google play. Highly annoying since there is no reason why the youtube page of some video should even have that app installation link at all.
I think it's possible that they will penalize youtube. Previously Google's Webspam team manually penalized Google Chrome's site, so it didn't even rank for the search term "browser".
Exactly. And, even worse, when trying to play the video on youtube on mobile, I often get "this video is not available in embed mode, please click here to go to youtube, and it reloads the same page -.-
Are mobile devs not eating their own cooking anymore? I can't do anything on a smartphone anymore, outside of some very well worn ruts, that doesn't involve encountering some annoyance like this somewhere between twice an hour to every other minute.
Of course not. Have you tried using twitter via mobile web? Stuff is broken all the time. They clearly view the site as leadgen for their applications.
Even if you try living your whole smartphone life inside native apps (which would be sad), you inevitably get sent out to the web via links. Opening in your phone's browser or through the native web view.
The native "web view" is often an inadequate browsing experience, and will have the same annoyances as the full browser anyway, only worse because it's a cut-down version of a browser, tethered to the native app that doesn't want you straying too far.
To the point about dev's eating their own cooking. It's a fair question, but one I think increasingly is about project managers and non-developer stakeholders calling the shots on things because "everyone's an expert" in the web dev kitchen.
I use both iOS and Android and I experience the problem pretty often, regardless of which mobile OS I'm using. It might actually be more common on iOS since there are more apps in the App Store than in Play Store, however I don't have numbers backing my guess. In either case it's very annoying, as this type of interstitial prevents you from accessing the content. As the article explains, small install banners at the top of the page as still OK (and honestly I'm OK with that too).
I also see non-YouTube videos embedded in search. I believe they'll embed videos from any site so long as they're marked up properly or in a video sitemap.
Isn't this a different thing? Aren't you talking about links which the phone recognise as YouTube links and open the app for you? While the article is talking about popups.
Hopefully they'll move their own products to use the solution built into mobile chrome [0]. I hope that this "official" way of prompting users isn't penalised. The engagement logic is in the browser and as a developer you can't override it and force it to show. It makes testing it interesting! I dug into the code and wrote up my findings in a couple of blog posts [1].
Edit: In case it's not clear, this isn't just for web apps. As of at least a month ago (Chrome 44) you can add native app install banners to a website [2].
Same thing for Google Calendar. You'll have to hunt for the tiny 'I'm one of those people that is perfectly happy with the website, please skip this crap' link somewhere in a tiny font in a hidden corner of the interstitial.
I fail to see how providing a short except that is fully attributed and links back to the original source is a problem. If anything, it steers even more traffic to wikipedia.
I suspect that's because for the most part it just siphons off the traffic that would have mostly been a waste to serve anyway, being that they were either looking for such a small bit of information to be encapsulated in the excerpt, or they determined they were looking for something else, they would be hard to monetize. Then again, I could be wrong or there could be usefulness to users hitting the end site that isn't directly monetizable (brand awareness).
I wonder what percentage of the knowledge graph result excerpts are full entries, and don't trail off indicating more can be found on the source site.
I think by now most people in the English speaking world know that if they want to start getting more depth on a topic then Wikipedia is a decent place to start. However, sometime you just want a quick summary/single fact.
yeah, especially annoying as they made provisions in their own browser to cheat on certain pages (like google homepage not needing permission to access the microphone)
double scary since it seems google is in a position now to steer (or probably 'make it better for users', in their view) the whole www just by tweaking page ranks
No. I never use the YouTube app on my iphone. I always play a video by doing:
Chrome app -> youtube.com (no prompt to install/switch to YouTube app, simply redirects me to m.youtube.com) -> search video -> play (which plays out of chrome and does not switch). The whole process is exactly how I'd hope/expect it to be.
I've exclusively used Youtube through the chrome app instead of the Youtube app because a few years ago I found that the search results were significantly worse/more heavily filtered through the Youtube app for some reason and never used it again.
Yes. If you have the app installed infuriatingly persistent, less so if you dont. Not having the app installed means you have to deal with the terrible youtube web player (which doesn't even use native fullscreen!).
Ugh, maybe this will finally push forums to burn those infernal Tapatalk interstitials. Forum owners: I'm looking for one piece of information from a web search, not a whole dumb app that will completely ignore my search goals.
Even worse, there are a lot of sites with outdated and insecure tapatalk plugins. We ran tapatalk for a few month and you had to patch it every other week. Maybe they fixed many of those issues by now, but it is still annoying.
I must be in the minority but the Tapatalk app seems okay to me. It takes the cruft and ads out of the forum you are on and just presents you the content in a relatively stripped down format.
Maybe my use case is out of the ordinary compared to a lot of HN, I use it for a single forum that I am an active member of, and I can't recall the last time I googled something and was redirected to a result that was a forum entry that redirected to a Tapatalk ad (99% of my google searches end up at stackoverflow or blog entries).
I think people aren't complaining about the quality of the app. Rather we dislike the fact that when clicking a link to a forum we are forced to decline to install their app before we can view what we are looking for.
Personally I close the page.
I really hope the creators of tapatalk go out of business.
If Google, phpBB and tapatalk and get their shit together they would support deeplinking and make the experience seemless. It's not even that technically challenging but could run afoul of existing ad models...
> a phpBB forum, meaning I won't find what I'm looking for anyway.
I'll have to disagree on this point. There are a lot of phpBB forums out there, and their quality and content varies widely as the Internet itself. Many of them, esp. some of the long-established ones, are invaluable sources for all sorts of arcana. Wikipedia doesn't even begin to touch the kinds of obscure practical knowledge embedded in the "dark web" of phpBB forums. There are a lot of Google searches for which a single post by some domain expert is the top result, many of which in old, old forum software of some sort, usually phpBB.
FWIW, I've never once run into a Discourse forum in the wild, i.e. via a web search, site link, etc.
There are lots of phpBB forums, and their content is many times invaluable. The application itself though, is completely terrible. It's not that the information isn't there, it's the finding that sucks. For example: basic things like having the search index work properly with unicode. The chances that the php, db and app settings are all properly set up for searching for "ö" are slim to none.
I don't agree with all the design decisions of Discourse, but it was (seemingly) designed to be a straightforward migration from phpBB and other similar forums (flat ones). Just having a proper search alone is worth the migration.
+1 on the discourse: Is anyone using it, like at all, except discourse? I have been waiting since it came for it to become a place for everything that Stack Overflow bans (non trivial questions that need discussion, "how can this be done in an elegant way" etc).
<rant>And: Can someone please please create a new stackoverflow that rewards solving problems instead of going full Daesh in destroying old artifacts, enforcing dumb rules etc?</rant>
I tried to use Discourse but the hardware and software requirements combined would have meant a $20+/month VM rather than a $10/month VM:
- Dual core CPU recommended
- 1 GB RAM minimum (with swap)
- 64 bit Linux compatible with Docker
- Postgres 9.3+ (2 GB RAM min?).
- Redis 2.6+
- Ruby 2.0+ (we recommend 2.0.0-p353 or higher)
Ultimately I wound up putting PHPBB with a different skin back on the server, since it just requires MySQL, PHP, and any web server.
Plus Discourse has a lot of strange features (e.g. auto-mod promotion) and it feels like it is still in beta based on the feedback they get on their own forums.
And don't get me started on the docker-based setup. If you want a local native install (no docker container) well, you cannot. Docker or nothing.
The whole product feels extremely convoluted and over-engineered.
Yup. I had pretty much the same problems, except I didn't even get to installing because the requirements put me off.
I just wanted something that sucks less than PHPBB or SMF, you know? But this thing mainly seems more bloated, and the live demos didn't really quite convince me of the "sucks less" part either.
One thing I haven't even been able to test yet, once you have it running, how much is there to configure in order to tone it down? Because if you want to run a forum for pretty much anything but a tech audience, I would like to get rid of all the "dynamic" and "interactive" javascript stuff. Because it really makes it less interactive/dynamic for people on old, low-powered computers. They need basic HTML full page reloads (assuming the HTML is somewhat lean--leaner than PHPBB/SMF preferably :) ).
Because the unique thing about forums, that still gives them relevance in the 2010s, is that you can gather a community with extremely specialized niche knowledge. If the person who knows everything about, I dunno, stained glass dyes, psychogeography or uh Sumerian breakfast recipes, just happens to have a really old machine you don't tell them to upgrade or suck it, because he or she may be one of the only people in the world with the particular expert niche-in-niche knowledge that brings invaluable quality to the forum, much more than having a shiny slick UI that looks buttersmooth on a new laptop.
I just checked out discourse and honestly as a user I would rather use phpbb than that. Im sure discourse is a much better piece of software but I can not stand the format.
well , it's easy , because Discourse is extremely complicated to deploy for the average joe. phpBB is ... in php , ie cheap hosting , sftp deployment ... Server side Ruby was never easy to deploy.
This may have formerly been the case but at least since they switched to Docker based installs it's incredibly easy. I migrated an ancient vBulletin forum over to Discourse last week and had no problems with the basic (fairly short) instructions. https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INST...
It's not very easy for an average developer either. I have worked 12 years as a developer, know my way reasonably around linux, and find docker about as easy to understand as chinese.
in what way? I totally understand being bewildered by it at first but once you start with it it's a lot easier to get to grips with than many things in the Nixverse.
I just had to create our Docker setup at my work, basically from scratch (and I'm a front end dev) and if I can, you can :)
Yes, I agree there is someting wrong with how they created that application. They have made enough changes to the Ruby landscape for Discourse alone, that the deployment story should have been addressed. The issue atm seems to be that there are no free/cheap hosted ones.
You're saying the underlying platform somehow has some bearing on the quality of the users and the content? Don't get me wrong, I agree phpBB is outdated but well-established, long-running forums are a goldmine of information.
No. That's not at all what I'm saying (as is obvious from my further replies). The content is useless unless you can find it.
Edit: actually, it CAN have a lot of influence on the quality of the content. Ever found a phpBB thread with dead images because the user hotlinked them? Discourse downloads them and replaces the urls with the locally cached ones, ensuring the images are there in five years. That's just one example.
This only applies to page covering ads for app installs. Not other interstitials. In fact Google recently did a study showing how 69% of people leave the page when faced with an interstitial [1], yet they also recently released an updated format for their own Google overlay ad [2] (although this is for apps). They don't want to lose web/search traffic to apps, but they make plenty of money running these formats themselves. A good summary of the various conflicts of interest is here [3].
Google is claiming to do this to improve user experience, however:
- they do these exact ads on every site they have
- they arent stopping other interstitials so sites can be just as annoying on the first page
- a site with great content should not be penalized for the site's own choices on ads
- they're forcing a change that affects everyone else except them
The PR signal doesnt match the execution. It's a monopolistic move and raises questions about their involvement in so many layers of the ads/web stack.
> the signal is that they don't want their search results to annoy users by showing them app install ads on the first hit
which is absolutely great. Well done Google.
Everything else in your post is weird and contradictory. They're apparently fine with advertising and non-annoying app install banners but they're going to make annoying app install banners less visible in search results. I'm really not seeing the problem.
> It might be good for the consumer but that's just a side effect.
See what I mean? So it's a great move and should be celebrated, but lets not congratulate Google on their motives? OK, I think we can all live with that.
"After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly. This does not affect other types of interstitials."
This implies the answer is No, since that's another type of interstitial (not an app install) -- but is one that blocks most of the page content. It's curious that they're analyzing the nature of the popup closely enough to determine that.
Which is weird because most of the reasons they give are valid for any type of interstitial, there's not a lot of reasons that set app interstitials apart from others that are relevant to the user.
They're basically a new kind of pop-up window, an annoyance that you have to click away.
I don't remember browsers only blocking certain kinds of pop-ups based on content, they just see if it wasn't initiated by a user-action, it'll get blocked.
I suppose for Google there may be some reasons why they want to block the app-interstitials (I guess because they want to encourage keeping the content they index on the web, not in an app?), but even then, that's still no reason not to punish the other types of interstitial just as much. Trying to make the distinction is just making it harder on themselves, they will occasionally get it wrong, or people will complain that their interstitial shouldn't be punished because it is (somehow) not quite about the app--making the criteria a bit broader seems like it's easier for Google and better for the users?
I always enter something along the lines of <expletive>@<expletive>.<expletive>. My hope is that they'll waste money on trying to email it and then get a bounceback that the email failed to be delivered.
It wont cost them money if they have a double opt-in. But you will punish those without the double opt-in by pushing them up to the next tier in the payment plan sooner. The amount of money they waste one one dodgy email address is minuscule though. What is more funny is that they will see <expletive>@<expletive>.<expletive> when scrolling through their list, and you could even send them a 'message' this way. E.g. WhyTheHellYouMakeMeSignUpForThisRubbish@fakeemail.com.
You can sign up their personal facebook accounts, though – if the user is facebook.com/username123, you can register username123@facebook.com, facebook will throw the mails into the spam folder, and report them to spam lists, and the newsletter ends up getting blacklisted earlier.
Well, as a girl, I learnt judo to be able to defend myself.
One of the most important lessons of judo is that you never use force yourself – you just redirect the force of the other person so they hurt themselves.
Using that philosophy in life makes stuff a lot easier ;)
And, funnily, it fits here, too. Using their own newsletter to get it blacklisted. The more they send, the less are received.
I simply close the page and move on: if they don't care about obscuring the content then surely they don't have much confidence in said content and neither should I.
I'm more annoyed with these sites than the app install sites. "Install our app" is annoying but still trying their best to send us where we will have better have better experience (at least that's what they think). These "subscribe to our newsletter" sites do it for their own good and couldn't care less about visitors. They do it so they can spam them with their emails
My favorite is when I click a link in an e-mail newsletter (I'm on one for a local news site) and... get a popup asking me to sign up for the newsletter.
Those are particularly annoying when im halfway through reading and they popup out of nowhere. I'm surprised it's an effective tactic at all to annoy readers (it has to be effective if they're doing it).
To play the devil's advocate, if it's coming at all, I'd rather it be halfway through the article than right as I load the page. Presumably if I've read half an article, I'm at least partially interested in what's on their site. Nautilius seems to do an embedded newsletter ad halfway through the article, no pop up, just enter your email if you're interested or keep reading. Very happy about this (though I still didn't subscribe).
> "Install our app" is annoying but still trying their best to send us where we will have better have better experience
Not always, apps give them the ability to have push notifications plus the fact that having the app icon in your app tray is a constant reminder of their service.
No one said these app download guys are awesome. My point was that these newsletter guys deserve much more criticism. A lot of them are pretty famous bloggers, and they know they're being an asshole but do it. The thing is no one criticizes them because they don't want to offend an influential person. It's sad because I used to have respect for many of them.
Not really, if Seth Godin started doing this tomorrow on his blog, I will lose all the respect I had for him. He knows that and that's probably why he doesn't do it. And that's why I lost respect for those who do--because it's a sign that they are one of those people who only can see short term and follow what other people say they should do (This practice is pretty much industry standard among shady marketers and "growth hackers" nowadays)
Are they? I don't think so. And especially not if the all is uninstalled within minutes. Apple puts much more weight into the ranking than into 'total downloads' (which would be the only increasing metric in this case.
Some clueless investor pouring more money indirectly towards junior devs, to keep implementing pointyhairbrained schemes. At least, I hope it's that and not worse!
That happens in Android sometimes, too, but my evidence-free sense is that it's usually rogue ad network participants because the app is usually some mundane game.
Oh man I miss olga. I had completely forgotten about it. These "newer" sites are the pits and every single one of them does this BS app install crap. Thank goodness for the "View as desktop" button in mobile browsers.
Do we have an idea about their business model? How much do they pay the music labels for the right to display half-quality tabs? I've always assumed the labels asking for money were the reason why there was so much advertising on those sites and why no plain-text site ever survived.
That's something I wonder as well. Ultimate-guitar must be in bed with labels somehow, or otherwise operate their business in a very shady way. If it's the latter, they are very lucky to get away with it AND get top-notch treatment in Google search.
They have a licensing agreement with the Harry Fox Agency, essentially for music printing rights. Chances are HFA puts the screws to them such that UG needs to hustle ads as a primary business purpose.
You know, at some point (and we are around that point) Google does cross a line where they are abusing their near monopoly on search. This is a pro consumer move, but it's another instance of Google saying do things our way or we punish you.
Personally I believe this is only fair, because such websites are abusing the inner workings of Google's crawler while displaying to users something else that the crawler doesn't see. I always wondered why such tactics aren't penalized, such as websites placed behind a paywall by means of Javascript, like the Experts-Exchange of old or these websites that show slimy full page ads, sometimes with broken links. And don't get me wrong, I'm actually for paywalls and ads, I'm fine with whatever business model can keep the lights on, but then if you want web-scale traffic, it's not morally justifiable to piggyback on the open-web. If you want to sell your slimy app, then use an app store instead of tricking a web search engine.
Also, Google's search engine has never, ever, ever been objective in the signals used for ranking. Their results have been different and biased ever since the start, which is what made their search engine successful in the first place. It's a little late to complain about that.
There was a time when the circumvention for the Experts-Exchange paywall was "scroll down a bit" - the data had to be visible to the googlebot, and they made it look obscured at the top, but it was all there and readable a few 'pages' down.
I happened to go through to my first result at the site with a dash in a year or two, it no longer does that. I wonder if they got penalised for doing it.
I'm not sure what makes this abuse. Curating the content you serve isn't just okay; it's one of the key value propositions of a search engine. The problem is when a content provider, for whatever reason, intentionally curates in a way that provides less value to the consumer.
One potential problem here is that this only applies to page blocking interstitials that promote an app. Page blocking interstitials that push signing up for a newsletter, for example, will not be penalized.
It could be hard to argue that an interstitial pushing an app (especially an app specifically for the site the user is visiting that gives them enhanced features compared to the mobile web version of the site) is more annoying, distracting, or otherwise harmful to a user than any other kind of blocking interstitial.
Thus, one might try to conclude that Google's actual interest here is trying to keep users from using apps to access content instead of using the web site where Google is more likely to be the ad provider.
I have no idea if this could rise to the level of an antitrust violation, but it's the first place I'd look for one.
There's an alternative that is more user-friendly which the browser provides, but only for app install interstitials. Since there's no built-in alternative for other kinds of interstitials, it makes sense that they're left alone (although the crappier your site, the less time people spend on it, and presumably the farther it falls down the search results).
Also, the blog post states they're essentially calling these sites mobile-unfriendly, which I think is entirely fair. All full-page interstitials are annoying, on the mobile web or desktop web, but only "install our app" interstitials are unique to mobile. So if you view "mobile friendly" as meaning "as good as desktop web", banning bad things that are only relevant to mobile makes sense.
Yeah, I dunno. I could buy the argument that a modal on launch isn't always evil (maybe it's a signin prompt), so we don't want to just block that kind of UI outright; we instead want some heuristics to tell us whether the modal is helpful or not, and prompts to download apps are almost always unhelpful.
Still, I feel like newsletter prompts are also easy to detect, so that argument doesn't hold a ton of water unless there's also a separate plan to address those—or maybe they're testing the waters with this one. I think I need more information to have a real opinion :/
So what about an OS vendor that "curates" a particular default browser and destroys a competing browser provider in the process? I seem to remember that happening a few years back.
It's not so much the curating that's the problem, nobody would care if Duck Duck Go did it, the problem is with the regulators that view Google to be the only curator out there.
Against whom is Google being anti-competitive with this move. How should we prevent this move from being illegal, without specifying what metrics Google is and is not allowed to use?
If google where to just use bounce rate as a ranking measure, that's fine -- if interstitials increase bounce rate, then site owners will have to determine for themselves whether it's worth the price. otoh, deciding to arbitrarily lower the rank because they don't like a particular type of advertising is exactly anti-competitive.
So ranking measures derived from user behavior: great. Ranking measures designed to prioritize features in your browser, or to push people away from apps (that, just by total happenstance, your dominant competitor does better than you, and which threaten to undercut your dominance in search/display ads): not fine. Which really is classical antitrust: you can't use your monopoly (search) to juice your other businesses (browser, app store).
Many websites with pop-up ads (Forbes, etc.) display a 2-5s timer countdown to dismiss the ad and view the content, which engages users long enough to stay on the site. This games the bounce rate and would defeat a solution that is base solely on on it.
Users will bounce if they don't like ads, with or without countdown timers. Acting based on observed user behavior is great. If they don't like it, they bounce. If they tolerate it, they don't bounce. Over time, users will migrate to less-annoying sites. Ranking sites on observed bounced rates, whether caused by ads, low quality, or what ever else, is awesome and should have no anti-trust implications. That's not what google did.
After all, if these ads really annoyed users in general, that would show up in their behavior, and thus naturally be picked up on by ranking algorithms, no? (They annoy me, but I'm not all users.)
As search becomes something that society depends upon, start treating it as a public utility.
> without specifying what metrics Google is and is not allowed to use?
Why not? If society depends on something, we regulate it. There are many different possible degrees of regulation, so this is not a boolean condition, even though painting such situations as a boolean choice between pure laissez-faire and nationalizing an industry (instead of merely regulating).
If you don't like this idea, I suggest that Google (or any other business) should find a way on their own to handle the situation (possibly by making their metrics more available, transparent, and verifiable?), or the choice may eventually be taken out of their hands.
Google would break if it were transparent. I'm frustrated by the status quo; I run a site where users who found it through search contact me to say that it should've been higher in the search results. I think this would only get worse if it were transparent, though. Gaming Google would become predictable and mechanized. The outcome would be ugly.
Fraud doesn't become legal just because someone has a clever idea for SEO. You're scenario only works in a totally unregulated environment. Internet businesses are not magically except from the types of regulation found in every other industry. The entire point of a regulation is to place limits on behaviors that harm society when left on their own.
However, focusing on my suggestion of transparency and verification misses the point. The method by which Google regains (and maintains) the public trust is their problem, and I'm sure that more than one solution exists.
My point is it would probably be in Google's best interest to fix this problem, because waiting too long has consequences. At some point, the people who feel that are treated unfairly by Google - it doesn't matter if they are correct in that belief - will fight back, which has already started in small, preliminary ways.
> The outcome would be ugly.
The outcome would also be ugly in a future where a socially-necessary service is controlled entirely by a single entity. As usual in these situations, the best situation is somewhere in the middle.
Gaming Google isn't fraudulent. It's just behaviour that lies outside of Google's guidelines about content on the web. There's no law that says you can't create hundreds of websites using spun content and dofollow links to a page you want to promote; it's completely legal behaviour, probably won't trick Google anymore, but used to, and works as a good example of how benefiting from breaking Google's guidelines doesn't imply fraud.
To your broader point, I agree that it's reasonable to want Google regulated to some degree, though I do fear regulators will take on that "transparent algorithm" point of view, which will just make search terrible. Governments generally aren't very good at regulating tech businesses.
The problem in the Microsoft case was use of near-monopoly in one market (operating systems) to gain unfair advantage in another market (browsers), though even that seems a bit outdated already since the idea of shipping an OS without a browser built-in seems ludicrous today.
In any case, that concept of using monopoly power in one market to bolster power in another doesn't really apply here with Google.
I share a lot of the unease many people have with the amount of power Google has been able to amass as the de factor curator of the Internet, but I'm also somewhat amazed they are in the position they are in and have been as (mostly) benevolent as they have been. I suspect it is actually pretty hard work just to remain somewhat close to neutral when you are sitting on that much power.
Chrome originally caught in for the same reason Firefox: when it came out it was the best browser by far. People forget how bad IE used to be and later how bad Firefox got.
Are you so sure about that? Because no one knew about it until Google started this massive ad campaign, where for weeks literally every single ad on the web was "INSTALL CHROME NOW".
Their TV ads were mostly ignored, but most people ended up accidentally clicking one of the Chrome ads, and then actually tried it out. There were days where every single YouTube preroll ad was for Chrome, every side ad was for chrome, every ad in the bottom of the video was for Chrome, every single ad served by AdWords was for Chrome, on Google.com were ads for Chrome in the top right with an animated arrow, there were ads for Chrome below and above the search box, etc.
It was horrible, and I really believe this was unfair competition. Especially as people using AdSense complained that they got paid next to nothing or nothing for people viewing and clicking Chrome ads.
When they launched chrome, the browser wars had long since been won. Everyone who knew what a browser was had installed firefox, and everyone else thought IE was the internet. Just because you ignored the ads doesn't mean the general public did. It sounds like you're being biased.
If you're going to attribute Chrome's growth to "accidental clicks on ad manipulation" instead of the massive awareness campaign, you're going to need to provide proof.
Several people on this page provided statistics and reports how they got nothing or next to nothing when Google replaced all ads in the AdWords network with their Chrome ads.
As I’m also not interested enough in the topic to research sources just to change your opinion, I don’t care if you’ll downvote me again.
Google's job is to get you the information that you want as fast as possible. Said another way, it wants to get you off of its search results page as soon as it can.
This is anecdotal, but I almost always abandon pages that lead to an app interstitial, which means that I end up back on the results page. This is a pretty unambiguous signal to Google that the search result was bad. So, the remedy that they're proposing is good and obvious.
It's not at all unreasonable that if sites want to be indexed for their content that a search engine penalizes them if they don't display that content prominently once the user lands on the site and instead display some advert orthogonal to what the user wanted.
My gut tells me that unless thing change the open web is not going to do well as mobile dominates: This in itself is going to eat away Google's core business while Facebook dominates on mobile. And the funny thing is that the sites that beg you to install an app are doing so because they see where things are going with the open web.
PS Another thing that may also hurt Google's core business may be once Apple starts blocking their ads. Google ads will become the next Flash.
And where does it end? With them dictating design? Demote sites they think are ugly? Or that don't validate?
Why only this type of interstitial and not those pushing newsletters or paywalls or surveys? "I know you've only just arrived and read all of one sentence but CHECK OUT OUR NEWSLETTER!"
This is a little curmudgeonly, but this is how I feel...
If your developers are not capable of making your website mobible friendly in 2015, any app they develop is likely worse. This is especially true when your app demands access to everything on my phone even though it doesn't need any of it to function.
You're suggesting that you can make something as usable on a mobile browser as you can with a native app. That's just not true; if it were, there wouldn't be any native apps.
For many use cases (games, highly interactive experiences, camera or microphone using app, etc.), a native app may just be better, and guiding users there might be a better experience and a better conversion funnel.
Yes, you can make a website mobile friendly, but that doesn't mean it will be as good as the native app.
> You're suggesting that you can make something as usable on a mobile browser as you can with a native app. That's just not true; if it were, there wouldn't be any native apps.
In the context of forums though, its entirely true and accurate.
If we were talking about apps, as in things that require more than an internet connection to work, I would agree with you.
Just because you can make it an app, doesn't mean you should.
It's absolutely true that a native application can be more functional than a mobile friendly website.
When it comes to websites that try to force their app upon you when visiting their mobile website, my experience has almost always bee
n the application is as bad as, if not worse than, the website's functionality. This gets to my point that if your developers are not
capable of building a decent mobile friendly website then they are probably not any better at building an app.
Also I hinted at the fact that in many cases these apps appear to be designed to track users and invade users privacy. Why else do so
many need access to contact lists and more when their functionality doesn't remotely require it.
If that were the case no one would ever install native apps. But the reality is given the choice, most people will use the app. I know this is a fact because mobile is my bread and butter. But if you need some evidence just go look at any of the analytics data that's out there. The majority of time spent on mobile by a user is using an app, with a much smaller percentage of time using the browser.
Most apps are ok, or at least no worse than the browser. Some are way worse. In no case does the interstitial take into account your momentary cost/benefit for downloading/installing or if the app is any good.
Actually I see this as a monetization issue. As site visitor all I have is your IP address and typical user-agent stuff. That doesn't get me much money.
In the world of apps, I can fool you into giving up your location (or on android just sample it as needed without the end user knowing) and other privacy stealing tricks I can resell to advertisers and marketers. I can also embed ads right into my application and have IAP to make even more money.
Until the mobile platforms fix these issues, there will be a financial incentive to push apps over pages. That's the elephant in the room here.
As I understood the article, they're not discouraging all full page interstitial ads, just the ones which tout the mobile app of the website itself on first screen load.
I'd really like to see a universal app / site rating service that judges apps / sites on their stability, privacy, security, legitimacy of requested permission, and general UX.
It could then provide alternatives to the app / site, and possibly even an anonymous whistleblower service for employees .
I would like to see a vote based search engine with modified reddit-style searching where a single vote's relevance is a function of its age and the number of existing votes. (but without the post life cycle of reddit where posts drop because of age)
Like many interesting ideas in search, this one's been tried several times. Blekko and Bing both used Facebook friends' likes for votes, but coverage was low. Google toyed with up/down votes for a short while after Wikia Search launched, but I suspect the overwhelming majority of votes were malicious.
On the other hand, using result long-clicks as votes is quite popular, and seems to work well.
I think it's interesting that they are making this decision - one that clearly pushed users to stay on the mobile web which is beneficial for Google - based on a study that was pretty flawed. This article debunks their methodology pretty well: https://medium.com/@alexaustin/just-because-it-s-google-does...
Thanks for the link, that's a nice critique. That said, much of their arguments don't apply here. The article take the publisher's ("businesses") perspective, but that's not consistent with a search engine in this case - the original study is more accurate from the perspective of optimizing for the search user.
The business wants to convert low-value mobile users into high-value app installers, and would happily sacrifice most to get a few installs if that's net positive on long-term value. The search engine, on the other hand, wants as many users as possible to be successful in finding what they're looking for. These perspectives are not aligned - high abandonment rates due to interstitials can be fine for the business, yet penalized as destinations from a search engine. The underlying question is who Google optimizes for in this case, the user or the destination.
Hi Eric, good points. But what about the case in which what a user is looking for is actually inside the app? More of mobile traffic is moving into apps - shouldn't we find ways to also index and show content as well?
I built an app without having a website before so I get the perspective of the app developer here too - trying to get people to their app. But I agree that interstitials is not the answer. We ended up building mobile app content previews (deepviews) for all the apps using our deeplinks (I work for Branch.io) which work much better.
I still do not understand the popularity of this approach. It seems to crazy increase bounce rates. You would think that negative user behavior would already make these undesirable without Google being explicit?
Fair enough. That was just the first google result I clumsily found. However, the web department at my company found that an email signup interstitial 30 seconds after first page load increased our email signups by about 4x, without a noticeable impact on our profit margins.
As someone working in tech, and does digital marketing consulting, there is actually a lot of value in these interstitials:
1) Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web experience. You can chalk it up to prioritization of engineering working on iOS / Android app development over a mobile web experience -- usually for good reason.
2) It's a solid retention strategy. You can harp on about bounce rates reducing activation rates (bounce rates aren't as high as you might think btw in certain cases) but at the end of the day, a 1% increase in repeat purchase rate (or insert other retention metric here) will have a much much more significant impact than a 1% increase in activation.
It only works for certain scenarios and cases, but at the end of the day, there's significant data to show that they work.
One unfortunate thing that imo is increasing the value of app installs (and therefore how much "collateral damage" in bounce rates is worth it) is that companies are starting to use them as a push ad platforms. Once your app's on the phone, you can push notifications whenever you want, not only when the user is actively using the app. While with a mobile website, once they navigate away from the site you can't push ads until the next time they visit.
The Hotwire Android app was the first one I noticed doing this, raising notifications unrelated to actual use of the app (e.g. for bookings). If they have a general promotion, like "fall sale" or something, they push a notification to a targeted subset of users. In their case there isn't even an option in the app settings to opt out of the notification spam. Yelp was the second app I found doing this, but they at least have an opt-out in their settings menu. For apps that don't, you can entirely revoke their notification privileges in the central Android settings, but I doubt the average user knows how to do that.
My dislike for playing whack-a-mole with this kind of nonsense is why I don't install apps anymore (outside a few trusted exceptions, like Wikipedia's app), and just use mobile websites.
> 1) Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web experience.
Don't give a fuck. If I wanted your shitty app, I would have gone to the Play store and installed it. If I want to go to your website, then I want to fucking go to your website. Don't be a bag of rancid dicks and redirect me.
I generally agree with these points. We ended up with an interstitial the same way I hope most everyone else did: we A/B tested it, and the results were clearly positive on engagement and purchase.
We could choose to drop the interstitial as a matter of principal or on the assumption that the difficult-to-quantify long-term benefit will pay off later, but we'd have to make that decision not in the absence of data, but actually in opposition to the data.
I am not sure I agree with your first point. It seems the most frequent case is that a user wants to access content right away. Regardless of how much "better" the native experience might be, its a lot of hoops to jump through to fulfill the immediate need.
I certainly can't argue that it does yield positive business results under certain scenarios, but for the average user it seems to injure common web experiences.
Sure -- that makes sense. I find that it depends upon the category or space that the company is in.
For eCommerce, this type of interstitial is a no-brainer: users have an easier time feeling more secure purchasing through an app vs. Safari or some other mobile browser. (Especially if it's Apple Pay enabled!)
For content heavy sites, it might be that the opposite is true: faster access to content can be used to hook the user. If you own one of these sites, you still need to design a method to get the user to come back repeatedly after you post updates. Email subscription modals do a good job at this, but people hate giving their email - especially on mobile.
Considering that even Amazon's iOS app was worse than their site the last time I checked—which is really impressive since their site is terrible—I doubt I'm going to gain anything by installing the app for Bob's House of Air Conditioners or whatever.
> "Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web"
Can you provide an example of an app that is infinitely better than its mobile website?
If you can just provide one example, and not any of the tech giants. One example where there's a "mobile web experience" as you put it, and a native app.
In and of itself I really like this move, but I have to wonder if it's good thing in the long run to allow Google to assert its vision of good UX on the entire web. Where's the line? Of course nobody is forcing websites to do anything, but Google is such an important traffic driver it's hard to imagine a site not having to comply to survive.
Not really, seeing as the article you link addresses that?
It's like a car company saying "we used to only make black cars, but actually we looked into it, and now we think people want colours; so we're making them".
Unfortunately your continued use of that analogy has backfired.
If a car manufacturer used to sell black cars, then added other colors, if their own dealers refused to sell the additional colors, it would be entirely reasonable for the manufacturer to step in (since it hurts the manufacturer's brand). So in that analogy, the manufacturer is right.
The reality is that Google aren't a car manufacturer, they're more like a car magazine. Suddenly they decide not to feature trucks, and therefore Bobs BigTruckin modal X2000 coming out next month is penalised because they won't be featured in the next issue.
Is it "fair?" In general, yes, but in this specific case because Google holds a monopoly on the market you could argue it is unfair. A lot of sites will suddenly see a large drop-off of traffic if they didn't get the memo, because so many depend on Google for redirects.
This would only matter if punishment was being dished out today - which is not the case. Everyone is being given a heads-up (until November 1). Also, Google has already set a precedent of punishing itself[1] for bad behaviour.
I wonder if this is more search defense than it is user experience work. One of the things web driven access gives you is access to the search traffic through that web site, once you go to the App all that traffic goes with it. Its clear that an app for everything is getting pushed hard by content providers.
Isn't this a tiny bit concerning that one company can effectively force the web to comply with their standards by "punishing" any non-conformers? I know Bing exists, but still, this is something that would happen in a monopoly.
No need to slippery-slope this one. Google have been very consistent about ranking exclusively based on UX quality. Once they actually decide to rank based on something else, then we can start raising a fuss about it.
Until then, the snark seems unwarranted, though I agree that there's good reason to be concerned: they definitely have a lot of power here, despite not having seemed to abuse it yet. That seems like an interesting conversation to have, especially in a more substantive format.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I have wondered this myself. Between punishing sites that are not mobile responsive and this move I wonder if their motivations are partly fueled by the fear that mobile users are spending more times within native apps and not enough time on the web.
As you can read here their response to the EU antitrust lawsuit http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/internal-google-memo-respon... google makes the argument that users spend a lot of time inside apps. I would expect they are worried about the ability for users to go directly to content and bypass search from which they make money.
I'm not sure which side of the fence I fall on. The web is arguably a more open technology than native apps but the experience in a native app is often better.
> Between punishing sites that are not mobile responsive and this move I wonder if their motivations are partly fueled by the fear that mobile users are spending more times within native apps and not enough time on the web.
I think its more driven by the fact that more of Google search traffic comes from mobile, so its more critical that the results provide a good experience on mobile.
True, again if users are getting good results through google search they they are less likely to jump directly into the app, bypassing google advertising. Content producers in turn want to take advantage of google search as a way of directing users to their content so they optimize their mobile sites and don't focus solely on apps. The result is a feedback loop that is good for both Google and the user.
I think you're right that Google are worried about users moving to a market where they're not relevant. That's why Google have made a point of becoming relevant: they have a mobile OS, a mobile app market, and a mobile app ad platform.
If people move away from web and toward Google's mobile properties, then they're probably pretty okay with that.
If they move toward Google's mobile properties I would expect they're okay with that. I think Google loses a degree of control over the user once they enter the app even if they are able to advertise. They can't require app makers to put ads into critical locations in the app but they can certainly do that in their search results. Google also doesn't have quite the monopoly over the app market that they do over search.
True. This is probably one of the big reasons that they're trying to make native apps more spiderable by search engines: they want Google Search to continue to be the Internet's entry point, regardless of what app you're using afterwards. That hadn't clicked with me yet - interesting!
Content publishers have created a really bad situation for themselves on the web from these types of ads, slow Javascripts, and other "ad tech" excesses.
Apple is responding with ad blocking technology and a news app. Facebook has responded with articles that load quickly from their apps. These solutions represent an existential threat to the open web, and therefore Google.
I really hope Google doesn't just stop at app ads, and starts punishing websites that do objectively horrible things to end-user experience.
Hm, I've rarely seen such pushes for app installs. I've mostly seen banner-like ads. However, I hope they will also start penalising websites that use overlays for mailing list submissions and account creation - before even giving you chance to read the article you came in for.
The most annoying aspect of app install interstitials is when the publisher doesn't offer a version of their app for your platform, which for us Windows Phone users is pretty much all of them. One more indignity I guess :)
Facebook links used to be so bad with this until they changed something in the built-in browser to catch them. Now every time I get a "this page is trying to leave the app" confirmation box I feel extremely satisfied that the redirect was squashed.
UIWebView is definitely still vulnerable, as I've seen it when browsing sites through the default Twitter iOS client. Not as frequently as in the past, however.
May be only me, I dont really find those annoying, in fact i find them helpful when they tell me my favorite site has an App and I dont need to use Mobile Browser to Read.
That is a feature of the browser, and is on the browser to make it not annoying. While it's fair to say you might find it annoying and might not want to see it, others do find it valuable. If a browser feature is annoying you, the correct approach would be to disable that feature in the browser. If the browser doesn't allow you to do this, than it's the browser's implementation that is at fault.
This all assumes the site is using the features the browser makers are telling the sites to use.
The correct answer is that features like push notifications should be opt-in in the browser. Too many of these features exploit the general ignorance of users.
> If a browser feature is annoying you, the correct approach would be to disable that feature in the browser.
Yet when some of us shut off Javascript - a feature that is often annoying, enables many kinds of tracking, and occasionally creates serious security problems - half of HN freaks out. Given that Javascript is necessary for many types of surveillance-as-a-business-model, hostility to the idea of disabling javascript is expected.
Push notifications are still a newer feature, but once that feature becomes entrenched enough that some people's profit depends on the feature, disabling push notifications in the client will be regarded with similar hostility.
Is it? It might seem like it's good guy Google, but Google is a company with shareholders and their mission objective (despite what they claim) is to maximise profit for their shareholders. They're the most powerful advertising agency in the world and they're punishing smaller advertising models.
Don't get me wrong, I dislike advertising; I'd rather pay for content, but this strikes me as anti-competitive.
These kinds of ads are the reason I leave javascript disabled on my phone. It prevents all kinds of annoyances and saves a significant amount of battery as well.
Yes but that's annoying when you want JS enabled to view something like a slideshow on a web page. Swiping from one image to the other requires JS, and you need to go into settings and turn it on. Then remember to turn it off again.
And you might not even know there's a gallery to view, because without JS the fallback might be a single image rather than a prompt to swipe the slideshow.
When the simple act of swiping within a web page requires JS, you're crippling your own experience. Not to mention all the other JS-powered functions on a page. Adding things to a shopping cart etc, is much more user friendly with JS enabled.
Hopefully Google can distinguish them from the "By browsing this site, you accept the use of Cookies [X]"-popups that EU websites have to implement now.
The EU law doesn't specify the mechanism used to inform the user. If you look around at different websites, several mechanisms are used, some more obnoxious than others. Popups are the worst user experience of the lot.
So they're still not punishing sites that force redirect your mobile browser to a failed app download page I see. I shouldn't have to worry about my browser unintentionally trying to download the Draftkings app from a sports blog I'm reading.
what about the companies who dont have a mobile web version? All they have is a page to install app when opened on mobile? Do they show the desktop version or kill that page? eg. Flipkart and Myntra
When are they going to shit-can sites that have tiny 'next' buttons next to big Google ads with arrows in them? The ones like "20 pictures of celebrities' hairy moles!".
As a user, I'm pro-getting rid of interstitial ads on mobile. But just for dissenting opinion, this definitely feels monopolistic.
"Stay on the native web so we can sell more ads!"
Maybe it's mutually beneficial for Google and its search users, but this is certainly the argument that's going to come from folks who are about to lose a ton of app downloads.
If anyone tries to make that argument, the counter will be simple: "We want developers to make native apps! That's why we're making App Indexing a thing."
There's definitely some advantage to keeping people on the web, since App Indexing requires buy-in from content producers, but, if browsers start truly losing to native apps, Google are prepared.
maybe they should punish their fucking AdX buyers that redirect people to the app stores for a change
note: i work for a publisher and when an app store redirect comes through AdX or AppNexus and someone makes a complaint it is one of the worst, most helpless feelings. this is why people use adblock and there is nothing we can do because the networks are, still, an important part of our entire revenue stream
tldr; Cool... but shouldn't google stop policing the internet and abusing, what some might call, monopoly powers for trivial gains.
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I'd be willing to bet, this will one day be in an FTC/DOJ report about monopoly practices at Google...
Google seems to have forgotten they don't want to be looked at as a monopoly or abusing their power for the small things. While this is consumer friendly, at least at first glance, I still find it anti-competitive and generally worthless exertion of their near monopoly power.
It also effects them quite heavily (GMail being my prime example). If I had to guess, this is a decision by someone who is lacking the resources to fully grasp the decision and potential long term ramifications of their action. Maybe they do, but for a company of their size this seems petty.
The potential anti-trust lawsuit however will not be petty.
This isn't an anti-trust issue. Google's not using its market dominance to move into a new market.
It's more like a common practice by retailers: using their market share to force changes by their suppliers. For example, Tesco (the largest UK supermarket) recently banned certain sugary drinks targeted at children.
Or Google will stop doing it before it starts applying the penalty.
Or Google Search will penalize other Google sites that use those ads. It wouldn't be the first time Google-owned sites have run afoul of Google Search penalties.
This is like a television service provider pledging to give their customers (who want high quality tv shows) more high quality tv shows and less shitty shows.
SourceForge distributes bundleware offer installers for only a handful of projects (I think 12) that have opted into their Dev Share program.
Interesting Fact: A chunk of Google Chrome's install growth has been courtesy of the exact same type of bundleware offers with Adobe Flash, Java updates, and free antivirus installs/updates.
Google isn't banning websites, only denying them "mobile friendly" status, which naturally downranks them. Fair enough too. When you click a search result link, you want the information, not a full screen ad that's hard to close.
