All I care about is the quality of my browsing experience, which takes a nosedive every time one of these fullscreen mobile ads shows up. As long as Google's algorithm ranks results roughly in the order of how useful and pleasant they are to me - even if that's just a side-effect of their own self-interested intentions - I'm OK. In general I'm not a big fan of egoist philosophy, but in this case, all I care about is me, me, me. Google should keep doing what they're doing.
It might be dictatorial, but the web has so few incentives to not load your website down with a ratchet of ever-increasing invasive crap, that any incentive pushing in the opposite direction is good, and Google is one of the only agents with the might to make that happen.
In the short run, it won't matter, but in the long run, it may likely affect your browsing experience on the whole.
Google doesn't do anything well but search. So you are trading a slightly better search experience - which may cost you the death of several brands that provide much more than search outcomes.
Trip Advisor, Yelp etc. ostensibly provide a useful service, beyond whatever Google will do. So when those companies go, we lose those greater services.
The impact of Google's monopoly is something we cannot ignore.
It's like 80% of Russians still support Putin, because he 'seems strong' - but Russians also don't realize how much he has de-facto degraded their standard of living. Russians would be a lot wealthier if they integrated into global markets, stop invading neighbouring territories. There'd be massive growth and opportunity for Russians - at least in globalist terms.
I beg to differ. Google also provides great products for - Maps, Email, Browser, Mobile OS, Video, Photo management. If you think neither of those are great and you can think of a better alternative, you have a lot of market share to capture.
Having said that, I concur with the rest of your sentiment and would like to see services like TripAdvisor, Kayak etc flourish.
Disclaimer: hold a lot of GOOG
They're still the best in the game - but that doesn't mean they're still doing it well. Just better than the competition.
* "term A" is in the body, and "term B" is in the navlinks but has no bearing on "term A". Google search sees that the body includes both terms and include it in the results.
You will care when nobody's in the business of providing hotel/restaurant/etc reviews...except Google.
The reason for this behavior is that Google is systematically destroying the SEO traffic of these sites
Most people don't pay attention to the overbroad spectrum of access many apps demand.
Specific example: Samsung changed the Gallery app (default on my GS7 to display photos from within the Camera app) to demand access to my Calendar. If I hit Deny, it aborts. My Calendar? Really?
And Google is the king of that.
While you make a good point - it's not like Google can take the high road on this.
There are one or two apps I use that do require extra permissions to function – like the NFL Sunday Ticket app won't work unless I enable location services, because it needs to black-out local games due to broadcast rights.
Some things are simply not available on iOS. For example, your app can't get a list of other apps you have installed, or send/receive text messages.
Of course, every once in a while someone finds a way to abuse a different API maliciously. Apple had to limit the availability of the API used to determine if a URL scheme can be handled by the device because Twitter was spamming it to determine what apps you had installed (if your device can open a 'dominospizza://' link, they knew you had the Dominos app installed). So now you have to whitelist up to 50 URL schemes your app might try to launch.
Of course there are plenty of safe apps that do not abuse APIs - for example, the Deliveries app by JuneCloud.
I think we can all agree that these types of overlays are terrible for users. And there are alternatives, like banners and static inline suggestions to download the app. I don't mind when sites put a "Read More" button that does little more than unhide some content, why not do the same thing to invite users to your app?
This is the key point of SEO nowadays. Google basically awards you if you: 1) provide good (better) content 2) have good UX
I think the point was: be mad at both :)
People don't use bookmarks, especially on mobile phones. Not many people are going to bookmark hostelworld.com and when looking for a hostel, they're not going to click the bookmark and search on hostelworld. They're going to Google search for "hostels in XYZ", and hostelworld will be there, underneath Google's own recommendations.
With the app though, the icon is conveniently sitting there on the home screen. You're probably getting less new users by giving on on web, but the users that you do get using your app are going to be much more loyal.
Remember, the aggregators originally dethroned the travel agencies as the 'experts' in connecting people with what they want. Google search is in the business of providing information, meaning if they have the info available they'll provide an aggregated list of restaurants to someone who wants restaurants.
Google has a long and storied history (since Dejanews) of fucking up user generated content on google properties.
If you're looking for restaurants and hotels, TripAdvisor and Yelp are exponentially better than anything Google is going to give you.
I stopped using Yelp the minute they made their mobile site unusable in a pinch while pulled over on the side of the road. It doesn't matter how good the content is if I don't have the time to jump through their hoops.
That's the point - that these businesses are providing enough information to allow Google to aggregate them for a user with intent, rather than just pass the user off to another website aggregator.
I always thought AMP was a way to get some visibility into Facebook sharing traffic.
It is to me. Any page that greets me with large pop-ups and "Download our app" messages can sink into obscurity, for all I care. I'm not going to download just any app and trying to force me by making your site deliberately shitty will only make me angry at you. I realy hope this move from google includes sides that slide in a ("get our app!")-banner after a few seconds, just right so I accidantely click the banner instead of the link I wanted to click.
Who the hell goes on a shitty site with annoying ads and decides, hey, I want a dedicated spot on my home screen for this shitty service.
How does one counter the argument that "anecdotal evidence suggests people who sign up with us are 2x more likely to convert, so let's force more sign ups to increase revenue".
But it's easier for them to extrapolate data and say, hey, we couldn't get emails of xxx thousand users, so we lost xxx amount, vs our argument that they probably lost a number of users who were annoyed by the popup.
Except, you can count conversions, but you can't "measure annoyance"
Everyone panicked and good old email is trustworthy. FB holds the contacts in their paid garden that they once so hard fought for.
If you visit to any "guide" website like TripAdviser, Yelp, etc, these days on a mobile browser, you'll notice that the sites often barely let you do anything without downloading the native app. They all but refuse to let you see content and throw up "Download our app!" pop-ups everywhere.
By traditional logic, that seems insane. Why are they putting so many roadblocks between the user and the content? Surely that must be driving away users, right?
The reason for this behavior is that Google is systematically destroying the SEO traffic of these sites by adding their own competitive features to search result pages that appear above organic results.
If you search for a restaurant / hotel / flight on your phone, Google will often show its own custom widgets above the organic search results. It's not unusual that zero organic search results are visible "above the fold". The more Google does this, the more the share of clicks goes to them instead of to organic search results in these types of searches.
That means that even if these guide companies have #1 search rankings for every possible search term, they are seeing their SEO traffic plummet every month because they can't compete with Google's "above #1 result" placement. So as a defensive move, some companies are basically giving up on SEO traffic in the long term and trying to forcefully convert many visitors as possible into users who visit directly via a native app (and thus bypass Google). They know that every web user who doesn't download the native app is ever less likely to ever find them again via a search result page.
So to these companies, they see this change from Google as another anti-competitive move because Google is taking away one of their last remaining lifelines for user acquisition.
Personally, I find those full-page ads super annoying and hate them too and think they should go away. But like anything complicated, this isn't a simple black and white move to benefit users. It's also a strategic move that helps Google and hurts some competitors.