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Google To Divide Its Index, Giving Mobile Users Better and Fresher Content (searchengineland.com)
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 How out-of-date will the desktop index be?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.
Won't this simply push desktop users to use the mobile site, and if needs be, spoof their browser identifier?
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!
Their mobile service is awful as it keeps sending you to the awful abomination known as AMP.
This is puzzling. why not have two "entrypoints" for desktop/mobile traffic and separate stats that way.
Y'all know its gonna be less accurate then ever before, with ever larger % of results censored. There's nowhere to go but down for Doubleclick/google.
What's the point of even having dissonance in their search results?
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.)
If their spider hits your site every couple seconds how is it distinguishable from an attack?
Probably because it is every couple of seconds. An attack would be orders of magnitude larger than thousands per second.
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.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Want! It will be interesting if the new W1 chip plays a part and if it doesn’t then I assume a wifi connection to the car will be needed not just BT and the challenge of keeping your phone ‘locked’ to your car network when you pass a Starbucks etc. All do-able i’m sure but it needs to be a really thought through implementation to stop it being a frustrating experience
Have number of such indexes, default defferently for desktop vs mobile, but let the user have ultimate choice.
John_Chalisque
Particularly since you don't exactly tell the 600 lb gorilla on the bus where they can't sit.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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. Neither should you be. Embrace the suck.
They're mostly white men too (propping up a few loud-mouthed cunts and foreigners), so rounding them up would be okay in their own eyes.
Appy Google knows that ONLY apps can app apps, NOT LUDDITE desktops!
Apps!
That is exactly as preattack stealth distributed scans are preformed. Slowly, for days or weeks, from multiple different sources.
When DDOS started following robots.txt let me know...
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Or maybe that is the plan, further dumbing down of the masses, just one more reason to opt out of this google shit
This doesn't affect my superior Bing results. So, why should I care about this?
Google is a snorky dingle dong with the face of a butt.
Seriously, there isn't any, which makes me instantly distrust this maneuver. Google is not telling the truth about it's revenue, methinks. :/
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?
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.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Google might be priming the pump for PC users to move to Andromeda, once Android is fully mated with Chromebooks. Mobile search will likely work perfectly on Google OS's. Google, Microsoft, and Apple all suck these days. Not one of them takes user experiences seriously. You get what they want you to have, not what you really want.
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.
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.
This is all bullshit anyway. The only thing different between a desktop and mobile version of a site should be the CSS. All the content should be exactly the same.
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.
Waiving a gun around? Does that mean he . . . uh . . . excuses himself from the requirement of having a gun while uh, spinning around?
Maybe you meant waving instead.
Google is apparently following in Microsoft's footsteps, doing everything it can to make its products worse. Microsoft's removal of personal privacy is one of many "screw you" practices. Today I learned that Microsoft no longer supports Windows 7, requiring you to use Windows 10, The NSA Edition. Thus destroying pretty much the only use case for a Windows operating system. Now Google no longer wants desktop users to use its search. Am I surprised? No. Neither should you be. Embrace the suck.
In nearly every case I too want the desktop site. There is one case (Ars Technica) where I prefer the mobile site.
Too many tech new websites have succumbed to designeritis producing over blown sites that make it impossible to meet the primary end-user use case: see new news. BGR is the latest one I've noticed but Recode, Engadget, Ars and others all seem to gone to new formats that look boardroom glitzy but ditch the chronological arrangement so important to readers of a news site. Ars is one of the few who kept a linear presentation format on their mobile site and it made the difference between my continuing to read them or abandoning them.
hopefully trump shuts those jews down in 2017
Is it upside down day at googlopia?
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
(rimshot)
ourpla.net is your planet
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
--- Keep the choice with the user..
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 a difficult time period for finding tech jobs.