From firsthand experience I can tell you the intent is worse than most people realize. The discussion is usually "well of course <company> wants to prioritize mobile, that's where the money is." That's small thinking. Those companies want to kill the non-revenue generating options in favor of the revenue-generating ones. In other words, Google isn't trying to de-prioritize desktop, they're trying to force you away from it (because they make so little money there) onto mobile. Once you realize that their strategy makes a bit more sense.

Do you mean that, in their ideal world, anyone who was sitting at their desktop computer trying to do actual work, and needed to search for something online, would have to pull out their phone and search Google with it instead of with their desktop browser? And then do some silly dance of manually typing URLs from their phone's screen into their desktop computer?

Because that's patently absurd. That would cripple their own use of their own search engine.

However, that's not to say that there aren't necessarily some..."people"...at Google who would try to pursue such a patently absurd outcome. Maybe we need to give more serious consideration to these "distributed search engine" projects...

That would make sense if Desktop didn't make them more money per user/click.

Simple. Google makes money from search ad.

Desktop users block ads. Mobile users don't.

Firefox + ublock. I feel blocking ads on mobile is crucial considering how small data caps are.

I did not realize that FF had mobile addons. Time to switch.

It's pretty slow tho.

Everyone I know with iOS blocks ads now. Ads are far more intrusive on mobile than they are desktop. Those full page takeovers that come up as you scroll and the ads that bind to any touch event to auto play a video are the reason that push most over.

> Desktop users block ads. Mobile users don't.

I do. Anyone who root's their phone can easily block ads.

You're confirming that >90% of mobile users cannot block ads at all.

Got it. It's not direct cost then but more like opportunity cost. Thanks.

oooh, this is good.

I don't get it either, but the reason I don't get it is it's free to give a tiny link at the bottom of the page letting people go to the other version. On mobile you don't see how many pages match your search result, so for googling an uncommon spelling you're guessing at, you don't know if it's 37 results on the entire Internet or 737,328 results. It would be sooo easy to add a tiny little link.

So why don't they do that? It should be super simple to do -- just do it! Likewise, here, it should be easy to get to the other link. I don't get their thinking here. (Plus, mobile versions of browsers should be basically as functional as normal browsers these days, so it's not like that's a good reason. Mobiles run desktop versions of sites just fine -- wasn't there just an article saying that the iPhone 7 is faster at single-core CPU tasks than any Macbook Air ever made?)