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.
Nadir, this is a welcome change. However, I don’t think it’s all that necessary since Google has been differentiating between mobile web and web results all along by indicating a page’s mobility by displaying a little green mobile graphic (see query “scores” for an example: http://www.google.com/m/search?mrestrict=xhtml&q=scores) next to the URL. The Mobile Web index will be nice if there are no mobile results in the index for a query, but in my experience Google does a pretty good job of incorporating relevant mobile sites as it is.
That said, I couldn’t agree more with the mobile web versus transcoder sentiment. Though I do think that Google generally gets it right when listing relevant mobile web sites, I don’t think the site owner should leave it up to Google to decide, as they sometimes get it very wrong. Have you noticed that Google sometimes transcodes pages that have mobile web sites? (e.g. first listing in query “jet blue”(http://www.google.com/m/search?mrestrict=xhtml&q=jet+blue)). In the spirit of increasing visibility of the mobile web, I think site owners with mobile web sites should add a to their computer-based site. In the event that Google does list their non-mobile web site, users with mobile devices will at least find the mobile content first.
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Hi Bryson, well, it was just about differentiating web results vs. mobile results, but more about mobile sites disappearing from the search results…
Of course Google did a good job of including relevant mobile sites in the first results, but it only included 1 or 2 sites.., so if you were ranking below that, well, you could just watch your mobile traffic sinking.
Regarding jetblue.com it does have a mobile site but the webmaster didn’t not add a tag with a link to the mobile version in the headers, which is the only way for Google not to transcode the site and redirect users to the mobile site.
They should add this in the HEAD section:
Exactly. Not sure why that tag didn’t come through in my original comment when I pasted it in. Thanks for rectifying. More mobile webmasters should understand how to use this tag, and stop leaving it up to Google to decide which site gets shown in mobile results.
In other words, if a mobile webmaster uses that tag, they wouldn’t need to worry about their mobile traffic declining, as Google would show the mobile user a mobile site even if they had ranked the computer-based web site first.
For example, if you put the query “lightstalkers” in Google’s mobile search engine, the mobile web site is nowhere to be found:
http://www.google.com/m/search?mrestrict=xhtml&q=lightstalkers
But if you click on the first link it passes on information about the source in the URL string (ie “source=m”):
http://www.google.com/gwt/n?q=lightstalkers&source=m&hl=en&ei=kamcR_j4HpS-rAKTvsn4Ag&sa=X&oi=blended&ct=res&cd=1&rd=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lightstalkers.org%2F
So that even if you access this link from a desktop or laptop, because the tag you mentioned is in the Lightstalkers home page, it takes you to the mobile site. This way mobile traffic never declines, regardless of the page that Google presents.
My point is, it’s great that Google has a mobile web index, and mobile webmasters should do everything that they can to get their mobile sites indexed and ranked. However, I don’t think they should stop there, as Google might still present a transcoded user experience if the mobile webmaster doesn’t include the link rel tag in the computer-based web site. If you’ve taken the time to build and promote a mobile-specific web site, you should make sure that your users always get that site in Google by putting that little tag in your code.
Great post as always. Keep spreading the good mobile word.