Are You Satisfied With Google’s Mobile Adaptation?
By: Barry Welford
Google continues to refine the way it offers Mobile Searching: the blog post is titled Walking, Talking, Searching, Finding:
You won’t need to sift through both mobile and regular web results, or specify your search type-local, image, web, etc.-as our new search experience will offer you results based on the nature of the query itself. So if you search for [bbc] on your device, you’ll get a link to the mobile-friendly BBC website. Search for [us post office], and you’ll get listings for the branches that are closest to your set location, and so on.
So just mosey over to http://www.google.com/pda and you’ll see how that works out.
Mike Rowehl isn’t yet very satisfied with how that applies to the findability of .mobi domains.
When I hopped online and started talking to some folks there were a lot of reports of the same kind of thing. Google doesn’t rank .mobi sites very high cause it takes domain registration length into account when figuring out how to weight sites. It also doesn’t really pay much attention to the variant of mark-up that a site uses, and has been just shoving everything through the transcoder.
He then goes on to say:
That’s really kinda disappointing. With all the current push in mobile - from mobile browsers finally starting to support sane mark-up languages and palatable variants of CSS up through tools like the Mobi Ready Report and the machine readable mobileOK effort going on at the W3C - it feels like we’re generally getting to a state where site owners can put up a mobile version without too much effort and in a format they find appealing and consistent. But one of the main avenues through which people should be able to find this mobile stuff has actually turned out to be something of a blocker.
The age of .mobi websites as this impacts the Google search algorithm is clearly something Google needs to work on.
However the adaptation issue associated with their transcoder is yet another illustration of the difficulty of making adaptation work satisfactorily.