Category Archives: Mobile SEO

Google Mobile Search Update : Mobile Web Index Rescucitated

In march 2007, Google launched a new version of its mobile search engine, which quite looked like Yahoo OneSearch. The new version consisted of a page with just one search box, after entering a query, Google would automatically categorize search results in Web results, Local results, Images and News.

The only problem with this new version was that Google didn’t make a difference between full web pages and mobile pages. Pages from the Web and Mobile Web indices were mixed together, users couldn’t choose what kind of pages they wanted to have. For example, before that, if you couldn’t find pages that would display properly in the full Web index, you could use the Mobile Web index and find only pages adapted to your mobile.

At the time, I explained all the issues of the new Google Mobile in that post. Several people involved in mobile Web complained about the change. I even sent several emails to some people at Google in order to ask them to bring the Mobile Web index back. Well, it looks like Google heard us. The Mobile Web Index is back on Google Mobile Search engine.
If  you go to Google Mobile and search for something, you’ll now have 5 kinds of results: Web, Images, Local, Business, News, and Mobile Web.

I’m glad Google decided to rescucitate the Mobile Web, because even if transcoded pages are great when browsing with a handheld device, they cannot replace sites created specifically for the small screen.

Mobile Search Kinda Sucks – But Does Anyone Care?

Peggy Anne Salz wrote a post at MSearchGroove where she discusses about the findings of a mobile search study made my Informa.

The goal of the study was to evaluate the relevance of Mobile/WAP results returned by search engines such as Google and Yahoo! on UK mobile carriers’s portals.

The study reveals that Mobile and WAP sites were hard to find in these search engines’s results, and that their relevance was often very poor:

  • Google and Yahoo off-portal Fixed Internet results were spot-on in terms of relevance. (After all, Internet search is what they were designed to do and that legacy makes it patently difficult to switch gears and excel in mobile from day one. As one content aggregator put it: “Google and Yahoo: They talk mobile but think Web.”)
  • Off-portal WAP results were a no-show and poor at best. From the findings: “Results were consistently off-topic, often absurdly so.”

It’s true that operators and/or search engines often tend to want to display traditionnal search results first, rather than mobile search ones.

According to Peggy, Informa informed operators about these issues regarding mobile sites results and it seems like they were unaware of that or really don’t care.

The operators claimed to be unaware of the problems; even more shocking is their indifference.A Vodafone spokesman said: “We’re offering the Internet on your mobile, and from the web results you highlight, we are satisfied that users are getting the information they want.” Translated: delivering fixed Internet content via mobile is the priority; WAP isn’t.

Yep, Vodafone have been saying the same thing since since the launch of their new Vodafone live! portal in the UK: they want to allow their users to replicate on their mobile devices what they can do on a computer. Pretty easy to do, right? Nope, even if handsets are getting better, you still cannot have the same Web experience on your small screen than on your PC.

That’s why there’s still a growing need for mobile specific sites, allowing a better user experience. But operators somehow tend to ignore that, and want to force people to view transcoded sites rather than made for mobile ones.

Peggy concludes her post by saying that no one really talks about the core issue: the state of mobile web. Does it even exist? Should there be a desktop Web, and a mobile Web, with sites designed for handset devices? Or does the mobile Web just consist of transcoded websites?

I personnally that we should have both. If I want to check out the New York Times website while on the go, then a transcoded version is fine. However, if I want to book a hotel room from my mobile phone, I would strongly prefer to have a site designed for mobile devices.

It’s true that there is an obvious lack of real standards for the mobile web, so all actors in this industry: operators, the W3C, mobile developers, mobile startups etc must make an effort to create them and educate site owners. Otherwise, I really don’t see how to trully improve the web experience of people using mobile devices.

Mobile SEO: Google Has Killed the Mobile Web

Google launched its new mobile search engine a few days ago.I’ve blogged about it on this post and highlighted the main features.While I think the new user Interface is better than the last one, I’m really saddened (and annoyed) by the fact that Google doesn’t allow users to search inside their mobile web index.

Instead, it has chosen to mix mobile web results with the regular web results depending on the users query. Google must think that because they transcode all pages, users will be happy with what will be displayed on their phones.

Google has probably analyzed the search behavior of mobile users, and depending on where they clicked (web or mobile results), they’ve now decided what to show to the user, without the need for them to select what kind of results they wanted to see.

So, that would mean that this new mobile search engine uses some sort of semantic technology…Yeah, right, the desktop engine is not a fully-fledged semantic search engine and Google wants us to believe that this is the case with the new mobile search engine.

So let’s see how good this new version is. Let’s say that I want to use Google on my phone to search for “ringtones”. With the new version of Google, we have these 6 results on the first page (I did this test with a SonyEricsson W600i):

1. http://www.ringophone.com: transcoded web page : Even if the page was taking so much time to load, I tried to make a purchase and on the next page, my phone displayed an error message saying that the “page was too large to load”

2. http://www.mtv.com/mobile/ringtones/: transcoded web page: Flash Site, unable to buy a ringtone (I got the “page too large to load” message)

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringtones: transcoded web page, Wikipedia page

4. http://department.monm.edu/uptildawn/forum/00000b93.htm?ringtones: spam page

5. http://www.ringtonejukebox.com: transcoded web page, again, I’m unable to browse properly and to purchase a ringtone.

6. www.umes.edu/accsupport/ossd/ossdchat/0000008d.htm?ringtones: spam page linking to a page full of ads (not displayed on my phone)

If you click on the next pages, you’ll only get regular web pages and the user experience will be the same.

If users still had the ability to see only mobile pages, their experience would be better (not excellent though). These are the results you would get if you selected “Mobile Web” on the previous version of Google Mobile. You’ll find mobile sites that will display properly on your browser an that have a mobile specific payment solution, for example this site.

So, did Google just go out of its mind?Why did they abandon the mobile web as a source of results? Transcoding pages is not the best solution to ensure a good user experience. There are more and more mobile websites that are user friendly and Google’s just decided to burry them.

I’ve sent a feedback to Google and I hope they will bring back the “mobile web” soon, as I’m sure a lot of people are going to loose a lot of traffic because of that, and users won’t be satisfied either.

[UPDATE]If you are involved in the mobile web and don’t want to lose traffic, please consider leaving a feeback with the comment form on Google Mobile to bring back the mobile web as a separate source of results. Also, please read Dennis’ post on Wap Review  who also complains about this issue.

Google Launches New Mobile Search Engine!

Google just launched its new mobile search engine in reply to Yahoo!’s OneSearch. If you go to the mobile version of Google, you’ll see this message:

This is what the new homepage looks like :

It’s just one search box. Users need to type in their query, and Google will automatically categorize them in “Web results”, “Images”, “News”, “Local results” etc.

For example, if I search for “britney”, Google will show images of the pop star first:

If the user searches information about a company and searches for a ticker, it will display this:

In this new version of Google, web results and mobile results are not separated, but mixed together. Google seems to be choosing which result (from their web index or their mobile index) to show depending on the search query.

This is what they say about this on their help page:

Google mobile web search can display different types of web sites:
– Webpages specifically designed for mobile devices will be displayed as is, and are identified by a phone icon.
– Webpages not specifically designed for mobile devices will be formatted by Google so that the pages will display on your mobile device. During this process, Google analyzes the original HTML code to get a sense for the page layout. In order to ensure that the highest quality and most useful web page is displayed on your mobile device, Google may alter images, text formatting and/or certain aspects of web page functionality to make it suitable for viewing on your device.

Users also have the ability to build their own mobile homepage, in order to add news, weather, Slashdot feeds etc:

It only took a few days for Google to reply to Yahoo! in the mobile search battle. We yet have to hear an announcement from Google to see if this is a beta version or not. I guess it’s now Google’s turn to compare itself against Yahoo! 🙂

UPDATE: A post has just been posted on the Official Google Blog to announce the new mobile search engine.