Put aside the claims of the search engine executives that humans are dumb and that mobile devices should be indexable in the same way as desktop. Google has had a role in driving down the number of queries people make when searching online, just as it has driven down the time they spend on their computers. Those are not good trends. What’s worse is that searchers are spending less time on their phones, and, apparently, less time on their computers.
Anecdotally, I know many people, young and old, who just never go online, and I don’t know of any especially tech-savvy person in my life. (My son, for instance, is 13, and he has never once used a computer.) A friend of mine recently told me she never even visits Google anymore, never mind going to the store or checking her banking or otherwise managing her finances. She buys things on her phone now and then, but she’s too lazy to even look at a website, much less search for the exact brand name of the product. So what’s it like, all these years later, to search using Google? My visit to Google revealed that it still performs quite well. (I was able to find and confirm that it does indeed rank by its knowledge and relevance for most people.) So that’s OK. (And I don’t agree with those who claim search engines have a monopoly on knowledge — it is Google and other competitors, not Microsoft, that carry the weight of this conversation.) But what’s it like to go searching for information on your phone on a traditional desktop or laptop? I take the Internet every day, and almost never use a desktop or laptop computer to search for a Web site. I’m more likely to use my phone or a laptop, that’s for sure. And I like it. When someone asks me for directions, I usually grab my phone and pull up Google Maps, then use the map to help me navigate (sometimes to find points of interest or even roads). On days when I’m driving, I might pull up Street View, or zoom in on the buildings and streets. If I’m searching for the name of a city or product, I might do it from Google Maps or the Google app, or just by typing the search phrase. That last recommendation came from Search Engine Land, which made an exhaustive case for Google’s dominance in mobile search. In an e-mail, Google said its mobile-search users received 25 percent more Web-search page views than people using desktop computers. And as Google puts it: “When you’re inside a mobile app, the desktop version is gone. There’s no interrupting the process.” That’s true, although it would be no great loss to have the traditional desktop-browser experience back in action. The smartphone screen doesn’t allow for much more than one line of text, and when you have to zoom in on a Web page, you also become plagued by unnecessary push notifications that tell you that you have to leave the app to read some additional information. Also, there’s no way to enter a password or pin — you have to do all of this from the app. Google did not say how much time people spent using Google’s mobile app or on the desktop version of its search engine. We can safely presume that for the vast majority of people, it’s too bad. I suggest a simple experiment. Go to the search page for a place that you are interested in and you want to know more about. Click here or here for mobile or here or here for desktop. Google might show you a link to the recommended page there. If you hit that link and no longer find yourself on a mobile device or device operating on a PC, you know why. The search engines should be indexing this, so that Google users can go online and do their business. The best thing Google could do for people would be to index the same Web pages on mobile and PC devices so that people with poor smartphones or computers can also find the same things they’d find on a desktop. They’d use the same search engines, and they would end up doing more searches and returning the same results. Google doesn’t seem to be that interested in doing that. But, who knows, maybe it just needs a little push. Visit - dubaiseocompany.ae
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