Live data from Hacker News

Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

techcrunch.com

101–110 of 311 posts

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#102
post #59

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.

God I hate tapatalk with a passion. It's even worse when it redirects you to the front of a forum instead of the thread you were trying to get to.

Even worse, there are a lot of sites with outdated and insecure tapatalk plugins.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.

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#103
post #56

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.

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#106
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#107

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.

How else do you open YouTube on your phone? :-)

Re: Google Will Soon Start Punishing Mobile Sites that Use Annoying App Install Ads

#108

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".

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-penalizes-chrome/3...

Post reply on HN