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.

There was a time when the circumvention for the Experts-Exchange paywall was "scroll down a bit" - the data had to be visible to the googlebot, and they made it look obscured at the top, but it was all there and readable a few 'pages' down.

I happened to go through to my first result at the site with a dash in a year or two, it no longer does that. I wonder if they got penalised for doing it.

people were so fed up with their shenanigans to cheat seo that a whole new industry as been born out of it in the form of stack exchange

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.

One potential problem here is that this only applies to page blocking interstitials that promote an app. Page blocking interstitials that push signing up for a newsletter, for example, will not be penalized.

It could be hard to argue that an interstitial pushing an app (especially an app specifically for the site the user is visiting that gives them enhanced features compared to the mobile web version of the site) is more annoying, distracting, or otherwise harmful to a user than any other kind of blocking interstitial.

Thus, one might try to conclude that Google's actual interest here is trying to keep users from using apps to access content instead of using the web site where Google is more likely to be the ad provider.

I have no idea if this could rise to the level of an antitrust violation, but it's the first place I'd look for one.

There's an alternative that is more user-friendly which the browser provides, but only for app install interstitials. Since there's no built-in alternative for other kinds of interstitials, it makes sense that they're left alone (although the crappier your site, the less time people spend on it, and presumably the farther it falls down the search results).

Also, the blog post states they're essentially calling these sites mobile-unfriendly, which I think is entirely fair. All full-page interstitials are annoying, on the mobile web or desktop web, but only "install our app" interstitials are unique to mobile. So if you view "mobile friendly" as meaning "as good as desktop web", banning bad things that are only relevant to mobile makes sense.

Yeah, I dunno. I could buy the argument that a modal on launch isn't always evil (maybe it's a signin prompt), so we don't want to just block that kind of UI outright; we instead want some heuristics to tell us whether the modal is helpful or not, and prompts to download apps are almost always unhelpful.

Still, I feel like newsletter prompts are also easy to detect, so that argument doesn't hold a ton of water unless there's also a separate plan to address those—or maybe they're testing the waters with this one. I think I need more information to have a real opinion :/

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?

If google where to just use bounce rate as a ranking measure, that's fine -- if interstitials increase bounce rate, then site owners will have to determine for themselves whether it's worth the price. otoh, deciding to arbitrarily lower the rank because they don't like a particular type of advertising is exactly anti-competitive.

So ranking measures derived from user behavior: great. Ranking measures designed to prioritize features in your browser, or to push people away from apps (that, just by total happenstance, your dominant competitor does better than you, and which threaten to undercut your dominance in search/display ads): not fine. Which really is classical antitrust: you can't use your monopoly (search) to juice your other businesses (browser, app store).

Many websites with pop-up ads (Forbes, etc.) display a 2-5s timer countdown to dismiss the ad and view the content, which engages users long enough to stay on the site. This games the bounce rate and would defeat a solution that is base solely on on it.

I don't think you understood, or I wasn't clear.

Users will bounce if they don't like ads, with or without countdown timers. Acting based on observed user behavior is great. If they don't like it, they bounce. If they tolerate it, they don't bounce. Over time, users will migrate to less-annoying sites. Ranking sites on observed bounced rates, whether caused by ads, low quality, or what ever else, is awesome and should have no anti-trust implications. That's not what google did.

After all, if these ads really annoyed users in general, that would show up in their behavior, and thus naturally be picked up on by ranking algorithms, no? (They annoy me, but I'm not all users.)

As search becomes something that society depends upon, start treating it as a public utility.

> without specifying what metrics Google is and is not allowed to use?

Why not? If society depends on something, we regulate it. There are many different possible degrees of regulation, so this is not a boolean condition, even though painting such situations as a boolean choice between pure laissez-faire and nationalizing an industry (instead of merely regulating).

If you don't like this idea, I suggest that Google (or any other business) should find a way on their own to handle the situation (possibly by making their metrics more available, transparent, and verifiable?), or the choice may eventually be taken out of their hands.

Google would break if it were transparent. I'm frustrated by the status quo; I run a site where users who found it through search contact me to say that it should've been higher in the search results. I think this would only get worse if it were transparent, though. Gaming Google would become predictable and mechanized. The outcome would be ugly.

Fraud doesn't become legal just because someone has a clever idea for SEO. You're scenario only works in a totally unregulated environment. Internet businesses are not magically except from the types of regulation found in every other industry. The entire point of a regulation is to place limits on behaviors that harm society when left on their own.

However, focusing on my suggestion of transparency and verification misses the point. The method by which Google regains (and maintains) the public trust is their problem, and I'm sure that more than one solution exists.

My point is it would probably be in Google's best interest to fix this problem, because waiting too long has consequences. At some point, the people who feel that are treated unfairly by Google - it doesn't matter if they are correct in that belief - will fight back, which has already started in small, preliminary ways.

> The outcome would be ugly.

The outcome would also be ugly in a future where a socially-necessary service is controlled entirely by a single entity. As usual in these situations, the best situation is somewhere in the middle.

Gaming Google isn't fraudulent. It's just behaviour that lies outside of Google's guidelines about content on the web. There's no law that says you can't create hundreds of websites using spun content and dofollow links to a page you want to promote; it's completely legal behaviour, probably won't trick Google anymore, but used to, and works as a good example of how benefiting from breaking Google's guidelines doesn't imply fraud.

To your broader point, I agree that it's reasonable to want Google regulated to some degree, though I do fear regulators will take on that "transparent algorithm" point of view, which will just make search terrible. Governments generally aren't very good at regulating tech businesses.

The problem in the Microsoft case was use of near-monopoly in one market (operating systems) to gain unfair advantage in another market (browsers), though even that seems a bit outdated already since the idea of shipping an OS without a browser built-in seems ludicrous today.

In any case, that concept of using monopoly power in one market to bolster power in another doesn't really apply here with Google.

I share a lot of the unease many people have with the amount of power Google has been able to amass as the de factor curator of the Internet, but I'm also somewhat amazed they are in the position they are in and have been as (mostly) benevolent as they have been. I suspect it is actually pretty hard work just to remain somewhat close to neutral when you are sitting on that much power.

This applies directly to Google.

Remember them pushing Chrome on you? having ads directly on Google.com? To this day forcing you to use Chrome for Hangouts? And so on?

Do you seriously think Chrome would have caught on if it weren’t for this push of advertisements?

This is direct abuse of near-monopoly in one market (search engines) to gain unfair advantage in another market (browsers).

Chrome originally caught in for the same reason Firefox: when it came out it was the best browser by far. People forget how bad IE used to be and later how bad Firefox got.

Are you so sure about that? Because no one knew about it until Google started this massive ad campaign, where for weeks literally every single ad on the web was "INSTALL CHROME NOW".

Chrome didn't catch on at first - they had to advertise the shit out of it on TV because nobody knew what a browser was.

Seriously, look up "Dear Sophie" to see how many awards it won. Google doesn't do TV, so that's not a monopoly.

Their TV ads were mostly ignored, but most people ended up accidentally clicking one of the Chrome ads, and then actually tried it out. There were days where every single YouTube preroll ad was for Chrome, every side ad was for chrome, every ad in the bottom of the video was for Chrome, every single ad served by AdWords was for Chrome, on Google.com were ads for Chrome in the top right with an animated arrow, there were ads for Chrome below and above the search box, etc.

It was horrible, and I really believe this was unfair competition. Especially as people using AdSense complained that they got paid next to nothing or nothing for people viewing and clicking Chrome ads.

And you know this how?

When they launched chrome, the browser wars had long since been won. Everyone who knew what a browser was had installed firefox, and everyone else thought IE was the internet. Just because you ignored the ads doesn't mean the general public did. It sounds like you're being biased.

If you're going to attribute Chrome's growth to "accidental clicks on ad manipulation" instead of the massive awareness campaign, you're going to need to provide proof.

Well, in Germany Firefox is still far larger than Chrome. Chrome eats up the share of IE, but can’t touch FF.

How does that equate to ad auction abuse?

Sorry, I might have misunderstood your comment.

Several people on this page provided statistics and reports how they got nothing or next to nothing when Google replaced all ads in the AdWords network with their Chrome ads.

As I’m also not interested enough in the topic to research sources just to change your opinion, I don’t care if you’ll downvote me again.

I checked this page and nobody here links to anything supporting ad auction abuse as you say.

Are you sure you understand what you're talking about?

I meant "several people on HN mentioned in a post when Chrome was introduced", not "several people in this HN thread". Sorr :/

>Several people on this page

That's not what you meant.

Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. This page == Hacker News. If I meant this thread, I’d have seat this thread.

> since the idea of shipping an OS without a browser built-in seems ludicrous today.

Windows 7 in Europe.

Google's job is to get you the information that you want as fast as possible. Said another way, it wants to get you off of its search results page as soon as it can.

This is anecdotal, but I almost always abandon pages that lead to an app interstitial, which means that I end up back on the results page. This is a pretty unambiguous signal to Google that the search result was bad. So, the remedy that they're proposing is good and obvious.

It's not at all unreasonable that if sites want to be indexed for their content that a search engine penalizes them if they don't display that content prominently once the user lands on the site and instead display some advert orthogonal to what the user wanted.

My gut tells me that unless thing change the open web is not going to do well as mobile dominates: This in itself is going to eat away Google's core business while Facebook dominates on mobile. And the funny thing is that the sites that beg you to install an app are doing so because they see where things are going with the open web.

PS Another thing that may also hurt Google's core business may be once Apple starts blocking their ads. Google ads will become the next Flash.

And where does it end? With them dictating design? Demote sites they think are ugly? Or that don't validate?

Why only this type of interstitial and not those pushing newsletters or paywalls or surveys? "I know you've only just arrived and read all of one sentence but CHECK OUT OUR NEWSLETTER!"

But when that happens you can always use....Bing :)