Google Creates the Incentive to be More “Mobile Friendly”
Although laptop has larger screen and adapts to almost all the websites, users tend to get lazy and turn to browsers on their mobile phones first to look up things. In the link referred below, the article states that if one is using Google searching engine on a mobile phone, the “mobile friendly” websites are most likely to come up first due to the recent change in Google’s searching algorithm.
As the searching quality is optimized according to the device being used, the change will actually affect many advertisers and websites owners. As the material mentioned in our class claims, page rank is determined by its connection with other pages and links, and it’s also related to the hubs and scores. However, in real life, the searching algorithm is much more complicated than that. In this case, it takes the device into account. If the page being ranked has a mobile version website (the so-called “mobile friendly” websites), its page rank will get extra score. Moreover, the more exquisitely designed for the mobile browser, the more score the website will get for its page rank.
Such policy might temporarily influence user experience in a negative way, because the preference to a mobile friendly website will somehow compromise the original algorithm on emphasizing on its relevance. Nevertheless, it would be an incentive for the website owners and developers to develop the websites to be more adaptive to the devices that the users are using. Such motivation to earn the top a few places in a searching result can be illustrated by the matching market in Chapter 15 that we were learning. It is always a big difference between the links that come up in the top rows and those in the lower ones, since the number of clicks would significantly differ due to users’ preference to click on the links they see first. The price per click is always proportional to their revenue per click, and therefore the website owners will always want to compete for the top rows in a search result. Hence, long-term speaking, Google uses the new algorithm to optimize the user experience for the mobile phone users.
link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/04/20/google-is-about-to-dramatically-change-how-search-works-on-your-phone/