Google To Divide Its Index, Giving Mobile Users Better and Fresher Content (searchengineland.com) 113
Desktop Google searches could soon feel slightly out of touch compared to those done via smartphones as the company begins to push mobile search. Google has said it is fully splitting its search index into two versions: a rapid updated mobile one, and a secondary search index for the desktop web. SearchEngineLand reports: The news came today during a keynote address from Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, at Pubcon. Illyes didn't give a timeline in his talk, but in a follow-up with Search Engine Land, he confirmed that it would happen within "months." Google first announced that it was experimenting with the idea of a mobile index last year at SMX East. Since that time, Google's clearly decided that a mobile index makes sense and is moving ahead with the idea. It's unclear exactly how the mobile index will work. For example, since the mobile index is the "primary" index, will it really not be used for any desktop queries? Will it only contain "mobile-friendly" content? How out-of-date will the desktop index be? Desktop usage is now a minority of Google queries but still generates substantial usage. The most substantial change will likely be that by having a mobile index, Google can run its ranking algorithm in a different fashion across "pure" mobile content rather than the current system that extracts data from desktop content to determine mobile rankings.
What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Won't this simply push desktop users to use the mobile site, and if needs be, spoof their browser identifier?
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Won't this simply push desktop users to use the mobile site, and if needs be, spoof their browser identifier?
Speaking of the point, let's be clear here. Users won't get "pushed" in any direction that isn't set up as the default anyway, because we all know that users are too damn lazy to put forth an effort otherwise.
Spoof the browser? Yeah right. Unless that additional effort is going to unlock more Netflix content, users won't be doing that shit either.
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That's exactly what I'm driving at. If the content and experience is better on the mobile version, assuming it's not prioritizing mobile only content, why wouldn't users want the better set of results. Push may not be the operative word. Semantics aside, Google didn't become popular because it was the default option in a browser. The fight for 'default search' status came after Google gained popularity against other large search engines.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
"... If the content and experience is better on the mobile version."
That will be a cold day in hell.
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You mean like this [wikipedia.org]? It's where Lucifer lives in Dante's center of hell (engraving by Gustave Dore). It's rather cold.
Looks like he's on hold, waiting for the furnace repairman.
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why wouldn't users want the better set of results
Because the are lazy and don't care. They just want to google something and get some kind of result (or an ad, I'm not sure if they can tell the difference).
Re: What's the point? (Score:1)
browser arch (Score:3)
Won't this simply push desktop users to use the mobile site, and if needs be, spoof their browser identifier?
Well, I do the exact opposite: when connecting from an ARM computer, be it a laptop or a SoC, I get a useless "mobile" pages on many websites. Some will notice NoScript and redirect to the normal version because javascript is ubiquitely required for mobile crap, but for many, you need to spoof for sanity.
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A browser "open in tab as mobile device" option seems more inevitable each passing year, sadly.
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This would be the greatest thing ever.
open as "iPad", open as "iPhone 6s", etc.
Yes, that would be really slick, not just for usability, but also for testing.
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This would be the greatest thing ever. open as "iPad", open as "iPhone 6s", etc.
Yes, that would be really slick, not just for usability, but also for testing.
There are already user agent switcher addons for firefox and chrome. You'll probably have to add your own user agent strings for newer mobile browsers, though.
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https://developers.google.com/... [google.com]
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And what does StartPage look like to Google?
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Informative)
But on the bright side this might be the queue for some of the other search engines to step up their game and reclaim some of the desktop market...
Fuck google.
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Won't this simply push desktop users to use the mobile site, and if needs be, spoof their browser identifier?
for good politically untampered and unmonitored search results switch out of google altogether .
start with duckduckgo.com which has improved greatly during past year.
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if you are an ignorant born idiot that believe all the crap conspiracy theories that comes from clinton camp, don't trust duckduckgo, use google.
enjoy fodder while you get fleeced like a good sheep.
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i thought about the same when i saw this , like
curl the cruel [stackoverflow.com]
but what im really wondering is why bother spliiting a search up into two's instead of one single optimized
i dunno
They've created search anxiety!! (Score:2, Insightful)
What a daft idea. I'm sat at a £3000 computer but need to use my £100 phone to get the best results? Plus I'll have look twice as search anxiety will mean I'll worry about missing a result.
After they dropped classic maps It's like they want people to use bing!
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And for the record, I am getting pissed at all of the companies trying to turn my 4 figure desktop into a damn phone! (MS Metro, Ubuntu Unity,
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EDO? Either you're writing from 1995 (which also might explain the $3K desktop) or you mean ECC.
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EDO? Either you're writing from 1995 (which also might explain the $3K desktop) or you mean ECC.
The price of computers hasn't really dropped much in recent years. Mostly what has dropped is the specs. Most current laptops are what were considered "netbooks" a few years ago. I was shocked recently when I tried to upgrade my laptop which I bought 6-7 years ago for around $800. Almost every laptop I looked at had considerably worse specs than what I currently use. In order to get something with similar processing speed, I am going to have to spend over $1000 and probably closer to $2000 and even mor
Re: They've created search anxiety!! (Score:2)
I am not the only one!
I'm not even a speed demon, but I have a fairly basic list of necessities in a laptop, and i keep finding crap after crap.
In 2012 I got an HP Envy 6-1030 with an AMD CPU. It was stupid cheap, close to CAD $300. It came with a slow 500GB 5400RPM drive, 4GB RAM, dual core cpu, decent graphics. I upgraded the RAM and put in an SSD over time. Still using it today as it works for my needs.
Now I'm on the hunt for a new one. Hoping to get one with 8GB RAM and an SSD, but willing toto upgrade
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I was shocked recently when I tried to upgrade my laptop which I bought 6-7 years ago for around $800. Almost every laptop I looked at had considerably worse specs than what I currently use.
Citation please that a 6-7year old laptop is a better value than what you can buy now.
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There is some truth to that. Recent laptop development has prioritized battery life rather than CPU performance. Even if you buy something with an i7 CPU, it's probably an ultra low voltage part that only has two cores and is no faster than the CPU in your seven year old laptop. On the bright side, the new system is two pounds lighter and runs twice as long on batteries (three times as long if you stream video because the new one does video decoding in hardware), and once you're up over $700 it probably has
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There is some truth to that. Recent laptop development has prioritized battery life rather than CPU performance. Even if you buy something with an i7 CPU, it's probably an ultra low voltage part that only has two cores and is no faster than the CPU in your seven year old laptop. On the bright side, the new system is two pounds lighter and runs twice as long on batteries (three times as long if you stream video because the new one does video decoding in hardware)
Yep. Exactly what I discovered. My 7 year old laptop has 4 cores with threading so shows up as 8 cores. When I look at it's passmark scores, it beats out most of the sub $1k laptops on the market. Battery life is not an issue for me as I need it portable but I always have AC so even if I'm at a coffee shop I just plug it in. The battery life of my phone is another issue but for my laptop, even a sub 1 hour charge (or even batteryless) would be sufficient for my day to day needs.
There is still one sub-genre of the laptop market that is putting the emphasis on performance: gaming laptops.
Yep, I'm currently lookin
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Dev machines that spin up VMs are not cheap. Lots of memory and fast drive arrays add up quick! Not to mention EDO motherboards
I run VMs from a thumb drive on my 2012 laptop, and the performance is fine. There is no perceptible UI lag.
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I'm fine using the dumbshit index while on-the-go but I want real results when I'm working at the desktop.
Do I have to use the awful AMP service? (Score:2)
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There's nowhere to go but down for Doubleclick/google.
Well, since they are on top, yes... Hard to get "on top'er..." Now it is all about keeping on top, which is a more cautious goal.
Why not just have the rapidly updated one? (Score:1)
What's the point of even having dissonance in their search results?
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an aggressive move to help kill the desktop market to drive people towards using devices google makes more $ off of
I highly doubt there's over one percent of desktop users who would give up the desktop because they can't use Google reliably any longer. What I foresee is someone (perhaps one if these desktop using dinosaurs?) developing a Google mobile search plugin for browsers.
"Better" or just "Different"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm confused by this. Is Google really going to make it's mobile search "better" or more "up-to-date," which not improving the desktop version? What's the motivation here -- to annoy desktop users?
Or is this more about optimization of some sort, i.e., that mobile users perhaps "prefer" different types of results (according to Google's algorithms), so they're trying to provide those mobile users with something a little more customized?
Well, regardless, I've never understood Google ever since they broke verbatim search (the ways it breaks have gotten progressively worse over the last 10 years or so). I can understand that most folks can't figure out how to use actual full-text search. But for those of us who actually do know and realize it's generally the most efficient and fastest way to find precisely tailored results, I don't understand why Google wouldn't even provide an option. Oh well...
(P.S. For those of you who still think "verbatim" exists, it fails in all sorts of cases. Trust me, or go to the Google discussion forums about this and you'll see thousands of complaints about where it fails. You can try the intext: or allintext: operators, which are generally better than Google's current version of verbatim, but they still break in all sorts of unpredictable ways.)
Just "Worse" (Score:1)
Google is apparently following in Apple's footsteps, doing everything it can to make its products worse. Apple's removal of the headphone jack is only one of many "screw you" practices. Today I learned that Android Marshmallow no longer supports mounting the phone as usb storage, requiring you to use MTP protocol app to copy your files to the desktop. Thus destroying pretty much the only use case for a phone other than dialing. Now Google no longer wants desktop users to use its search. Am I surprized? No.
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That is absolutely the most infuriating thing ever.
Even after having just added a certain keyword to refine the search, Google sometimes plainly refuses to include it in the top results and shows me the same list I just clearly indicated did not answer my query by adding another keyword.
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I can understand that most folks can't figure out how to use actual full-text search. But for those of us who actually do know and realize it's generally the most efficient and fastest way to find precisely tailored results
I'm not convinced that this is the case. Actual full-text search is great when you're looking for something which will match very few pages, which is true only if the precise set of terms being searched for is rare, either because some of the terms are rare, or because their particular combination is rare. If neither of those are true, then what you really need is a search engine that can understand the context of your query, and give you that. And that is precisely what Google is evolving towards.
The wa
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What's the motivation here -- to annoy desktop users?
Maybe the opposite. Remember Google's next move is going to affect the pagerank of search results which don't provide a mobile interface. As a desktop user I couldn't care less about this. It makes sense to split the rankings.
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As a mobile user, I prefer sites which do NOT have a mobile interface.
I have never found a single website that is better with it's "mobile" version than it's full version on my phone. It is ALWAYS better to have the full desktop site on my phone. Every single time.
If I could down rank every single "mobile compatible" page I would.
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Really? I find thousands. From simple things like being unable to log in, or have either text or content obscured by the layout, to completely broken layouts, or even simple things like not wanting to load a 10MB page on my mobile contract (check how much traffic it uses loading the Slashdot home page on a browser vs a phone and then look at how lean Slashdot on the desktop is compared to most of the web).
If you think it's always better then you can firmly sit in the crazy camp. Use a user agent switching e
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I get that desktop users are (on their way to being) a minority, I don't ask for preferential treatment just g
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Probably because it is every couple of seconds. An attack would be orders of magnitude larger than thousands per second.
The stupid criminal storms into the bank, yelling at everyone and demanding money while waiving a gun around.
The smart criminal creeps in silently, and takes your valuables when you're not expecting it.
Not every attack is stupid in nature, and your analysis of this still does not provide an answer.
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First, if your site can't handle a hit every couple of seconds, you need to throw it away. Second, there is this little file called robots.txt that you should read about. With it, you can tell the spider how quickly it should crawl your site, and what parts it should crawl. With a sitemap, you can even tell it how often each page is likely to change.
Mobile apps (Score:3)
The idea is to install a mobile app. Same as with e.g. FB - there are www and m website versions, but also apps. Same with many other companies.
Why? Because an app can have access to more data on your mobile, which a website can't (yet) reach.
At least, that's what I think.
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The idea is to install a mobile app.
They've offered a mobile app for years - I just don't think very many people use it (because why would you install an app for a web search?)
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Because an app can have access to more data on your mobile, which a website can't (yet) reach.
One reason I do not install apps. And when you strip functionality because I am on a phone, I will stop using it, not install the app...
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And when you strip functionality because I am on a phone, I will stop using it, not install the app...
Exactly.
User setting (Score:2)
Have number of such indexes, default defferently for desktop vs mobile, but let the user have ultimate choice.
Net neutrality be damned, I guess. (Score:3)
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The option here is to go to another search provider if you do not like it. With NN, the object is to protect network users from their traffic being deprioritized in ways they cannot control.
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What the hell has this got to do with net neutrality? If you believe that we should force identical content to be delivered to desktops and mobiles we either would have screwed up the desktop, killed the smartphone on its inception.
+4 Insightful (Score:2)
Google is a snorky dingle dong with the face of a butt.
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That's not Google you're looking at. It's a mirror.
Anti-competitive? (Score:1)
Am I the only one that sees this as a move to punish desktop users (where Google has no usage quota) and reward mobile users (where Google has the biggest share)?
If Microsoft did this, we would be all over them for it - and with a reason. Why do Google and Apple get away with making anti-competitive moves that only hurt users?
Remove restrictions (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now Google lower-ranks your site for a variety of reasons relating to "but it doesn't work on a phone [crying sound]." While it makes sense to optimize for a phone normally (if trying to reach the largest audience), there are many cases where it actually hurts the site. I wonder if this means that the desktop index will remove those prioritization, allowing some of the old, but gold, content to bubble back up.
Also, I think Google using their monopoly power to decide how "popular" or "relevant" your site is to a search by if it cottons to their favored development styles is a pretty clear anti-trust violation.
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Right now Google lower-ranks your site for a variety of reasons relating to "but it doesn't work on a phone [crying sound]." While it makes sense to optimize for a phone normally (if trying to reach the largest audience), there are many cases where it actually hurts the site.
And by "many" times, you mean, "every single time" right? I have NEVER, not a single time, found a "mobile" version of a webpage that I like better on my phone than the full desktop version. Mobile sites need to die a horrible death.
I wonder if this means that the desktop index will remove those prioritization, allowing some of the old, but gold, content to bubble back up.
If true, I will definitely find a way to get my phone to use the desktop index, because if there's any possible way to eliminate "mobile friendly" sites from destroying the browsing experience on my phone, I'm all for it!
Steering people to Andromeda (Score:2)
Fuck mobile (Score:2, Insightful)
First it ruined web "design" by giving us huge fonts, mystery navigation and full width text. Now it's going to ruin search too? I'm gonna make my own internet, and none of you millenial shitsters are invited.
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Why should the CSS be different?
Should my tablet really be forced in to a different version of the page than my netbook when they have basically the same screen size?
There is NEVER an excuse for offering a different page to mobile users than desktop users, NEVER. Every single time it provides a worse experience. EVERY time.
the crawl (Score:3)
This might actually be more about the crawl than the index. The mobile index could be set to crawl content in mobile format only, and more often.
What makes freshness important, in the first place? Mostly celebrity gossip, and the retail deal of the hour. Neither of those are functions people do much on PCs anyway.
Still, if Google decides not to keep long-form content reasonably fresh (if not fresher) in their desktop index, it foreshadows a Yahooesque self-inflicted extinction event of their traditional core brand.
BACKWARDS (Score:2)
Is it upside down day at googlopia?
People still use Google? o_O (Score:1)
(rimshot)
Pinterest (Score:2)
What Google needs to go is provide an easy way to eliminate Pinterest results. That god damn site is taking over search restults, and it's useless without signing up.
#fuckpinterest
The sky is not falling (Score:2)
The unemployment rate for software developers is somewhere around 2.6%. That is a rate so low, that if you're a decent developer and can't get a job, you're doing it wrong, or perhaps living in the wrong city. When I had to look for a job this past summer, I was able to get interviews with four different companies within a couple of weeks, and was hired in a couple more, and that's despite being 50 years old!
It's always stressful to be in a layoff. I've been in several myself. But we're certainly not in