I'm sure the ad men will come up with an even more irritating replacement, though in the meantime, it will be refreshing to be able to visit pages without having to decline to install an app.
Google tells popup ads to p*** off on mobes
Google will be rejigging its search algorithm to downgrade websites that slap up a large advert, aka an "interstitial," before readers can actually get to see the content. On January 10, the Chocolate Factory will start scanning websites for interstitials and, if they break the recommended guidelines, they'll be kicked down …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 20:41 GMT Baldy50
Good news that they're listening to their consumer base? Maybe?
If the OS and APPS are good people will forgive a little and it's a balance between functionality, ease of use, the rest and a company that makes money from advertising, it's a free OS sort of!
The stop p ing us off message might be getting through, I'm an optimist!
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Thursday 25th August 2016 06:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
The stopping us off message might be getting through, I'm an optimist!
Given that it is Google, you're *WAY* too optimistic.
and, if they break the recommended guidelines, they'll be kicked down the rankings and thus get fewer visitors.
What you're looking at is implementing a control mechanism in the hands of Google. Unelected, uncontrolled, definitely not transparent, as far removed from accountability as your average politician and rife with conflict of interest because who, pray, makes the most $$$ with advertising? Golly, what an *amazing* coincidence!
If there was a wholly independent organisation doing this, fine. As it's Google I would be vewwy, vewwy careful. They don't care about your "message" - they only care about their profit.
That said, both Google and Apple could do with clearer labelling of "free" apps - I think apps that download ads onto your hardware should be labelled as such, as it's not quite as "free" as they pretend. Apps makers that switch from free to ad-supported should not be allowed to do that as an update, but as a new version, this to prevent "thin end of the wedge" strategies (we already have that in Data Protection law, you can't expand your use of submitted personal data without permission - which is why I'm about to have fun with companies sending me surveys - the second most hated contents of my inbox).
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Thursday 25th August 2016 09:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
"That said, both Google and Apple could do with clearer labelling of "free" apps - I think apps that download ads onto your hardware should be labelled as such"
Don't know about Apple but Google does this already on Android. It states under the Install button the words "Contains ads" and/or "In-app purchases". If you click for more info it then tells you the cost of the in-app purchases.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 09:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Google Internet Police
I dislike overlay ads as much as the next person.
But I dislike Google's self-appointed policing of the Internet even more. I like my legislators to be seated with a vote.
I know why and I know how we're in this position. But it needs to stop. The Internet does not belong to Google.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 11:32 GMT VinceH
Re: Google Internet Police
While, yes, it's their search engine, it's not an issue of just using a different one - the internet police reference isn't an end user issue in this instance, it's about
GryzzlGoogle laying down the law about what site owners can and can't have on their websites*. You can argue about different search engines until you're blue in the face, but the problem is thatGryzzlGoogle is huge, andGryzzlGoogle is therefore important when it comes to being found.* Although this is a rock and a hard place situation, because I like that this sort of advertising is being pressured out - but it's not even the thin end of the wedge, because
GryzzlGoogle have already started doing this sort of thing, such as downranking sites that aren't mobile friendly (big widely spaced buttons, etc). The wedge is in, and they're pushing it further in.-
Thursday 25th August 2016 11:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Google Internet Police
AFAIK they are only downranking non-mobile friendly pages if you search from a mobile device. That kinda makes sense, sites that show a fixed width or even a scrunched up version of their site on mobile are a PITA and if there was an alternative that could be read on mobile that would be preferential in the rankings.
Spacing of buttons, doesn't affect rankings as far as I know, just whether it redirects to an m. site or is responsive.
Although I don't like the power of Google, it seems fair to say that if you have a crap site with a crap experience for visitors it is deemed not as useful and so is downranked - not as a punishment but just to ensure the top results are the best quality.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 11:25 GMT Mark Simon
Re: Google Internet Police
Agreed. Personally I’ve stopped using Google, but the point is that most users haven’t, and Google have much too much power to influence what people get to see. That’s one reason I changed — I was tired of Google skewing the results towards what might be more profitable.
There was a time when web developers had to check whether Internet Explorer granted the permission to use features available in other browsers. Now developers will need Google’s permission to develop a site that will be noticed. I think that is one reason why proper use of HTML5 features has been slow moving.
I hate ads probably more than the next person, but I would never trust Google to decide who has the right to get noticed.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 02:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Cookies
That cookie law was always stupid. If you click "no" the site has to give you a cookie to remember that, or ask you on every. single. page. Law be buggered, I never bothered with it. It's external advertiser's tracking cookies that are the problem; but the people writing the laws do not understand what they're doing.
Here in Spain -and I kid you not- there is a jihad on contact forms, because the arsehats who write the laws cannot tell the difference between a contact form and a mailing list subscription thingy. I ignore that one too.
Never did interstitials; external adverts; or sound that fired on page load. First client I ever sacked wanted sound (it was MIDI-ish at the time - 8-bit boing, twang, dong) and wouldn't believe no for an answer. Up until then, I didn't know you could sack a client...it was very liberating.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 07:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Cookies
That cookie law was always stupid
That's a not entirely unexpected result of politicians trying to regulate things they don't understand, augmented by the fact that few technical people have the skills to clarify the issue for them without lapsing into jargon and detail. If we don't find a way to close that gap, this sort of nonsense will keep happening.
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Wednesday 31st August 2016 02:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Cookies
Yeah, fuck the EU and their pro-privacy laws. Who needs privacy, seriously.
The issue is peoples abuse of a perfectly valid piece of technology. Cookies work around the problem of HTTP being stateless by allowing the client to tell the server, "I'm so-and-so that you talked to 5 minutes ago".
Useful for sites like this one unless you like typing your username and password with every post.
The problem, is people abusing them to track people across unrelated websites. I don't mind if there's a cookie that says "I logged into gmail" that gets seen by Blogger (another Google service). The two are run by the same company, and use the same log-in system. I object though if that same cookie is witnessed by Amazon, as frankly it is none of their business. Similarly, I object to DoubleClick.net seeing that cookie, as although they're a Google service, that service has nothing technically to do with providing the service I'm using: it merely funds it.
It's not the use of cookies that's the problem, it's how they're used, and it's exactly what the EU law ignores.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 21:09 GMT hellwig
Hey Googly...
""We previously explored a signal that checked for interstitials that ask a user to install a mobile app," the Chocolate Factory's webmaster blog states.""
You explored this, but did you fix it? I'd love it if you punished those apps in the app store too, not just the websites.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 00:50 GMT Kevin McMurtrie
Re: Hey Googly...
99% of PlayStore would vanish if Google removed all apps that were vulnerable to click-fraud, phishing, and hijacks through malicious adverts. That's not good business to a company making money from data collection and advertising.
The real motivation is for Google blocking online crap is that it's not Google's online crap.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 21:11 GMT regprentice
Between these large ads, banners for advising cookie use as well asother floating taskbars/menus many websites are difficult to navigate or read on even a decent sized phone. Especially when these ads seem designed to get in the way of normal navigation to trigger 'false' clickthroughs.
I clicked on the article in the hope that this was to deal with the increasing problem of full page 'popup/popunder' type ads that seem tobe prevalent now...'your system has 24 virus and will self destruct in 2 minutes. Not malwRe on the device and seemi gly pushed by google ads.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 06:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
All That Power...
* Wonder what kind of 'privacy-shield' the big slurpers have for protecting their own families. Especially the more vulnerable such as parents / kids etc. We know Zuk covers the mic / webcam. But in general, what do the 'tech royalty' do...
* Does Googhoul suck up all its family's info, or is there a special Tor / VPN like filter, that protects the chosen few, the type of feature that only tech-billionaires have.
* Or maybe its simpler. Perhaps, the inner circle just type a short code into every search and the system magically ignores any trace. (Auto-filled Toolbar Search)
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Thursday 25th August 2016 09:44 GMT jaywin
Intersitals
Looks to me like the problem with interstitals is that they're becoming more popular because of people using the likes of ad-block, and they're more likely to be sold in house than through the likes of Adsense, depriving Google not only of their revenue, but their data-gathering too.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 10:51 GMT Valeyard
they need to solve the SERIOUS problems:
sites where you've clicked a link to a specific page, which displays happily for 2 seconds, until the site says "oh you're on a mobile. allow me to switch to mobile view, and redirect you BACK TO THE FRONT PAGE AND NOT THE CONTENT YOU CAME FOR. have a nice day"
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Thursday 25th August 2016 12:04 GMT RyokuMas
The hidden truth...
"We previously explored a signal that checked for interstitials that ask a user to install a mobile app"
And there, tucked quietly away, is the real reason behind this. Google do not want you using apps - they want you using websites and thus continually adding to their vast coffers of profiling information. And by hiding behind a claim of "removing interstitials", they can make this appear palatable to most people, including the IT-savvy, in exactly the same way as having carriers responsible for rolling out Android updates makes the idea of Google having control over said updates seem reasonable.
Just another step in the grand plan to create a monopoly and manipulate people into welcoming it.