The programmable web (aka Web 2.0) is a fascinating and dangerous place. WINKsite’s founder Dave Harper just noticed what should be a cool new mashup — and is instead a perpetuation of the misdeeds of others. Mobilicious [screenshots here] is a reasonably well-executed mashup of the delicious API and Google Mobile Search. The problem is that Google Mobile Search trashes every mobile site on the planet while violating our copyrights for good measure. Mobilicious integrates these copyright violations with delicious and passes the problems along.
To use WINKsite as a specific example, Google Mobile Search ignores the mobile site that took our founders years of hard work and which is now a global mobile community used by tens of thousands of people every day. Instead, Google Mobile Search uses our standard web homepage, rips it apart, and sends it to people’s mobile phones as 15 crappy pages of unintelligible garbage. Google has an obscure opt-out from this re-processing, but not even their own mobile FAQ relects it accurately. Specifically, the second sentence in this quote from the Google FAQ entry isn’t true:
Our system automatically translates regular pages into wap-compatible [i.e. mobile] pages. In cases where a wap-compatible site already exists, we redirect the user to the wap-compatible site instead of translating the page ourselves.
In general with Google Mobile Search, rather than “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google is making truth of a spoof in The Onion: “Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index.” Excerpting a comment that I made on MobHappy’s recent Who Gave Google Permission to be the Judge and Jury of Mobile Content?
Google is already censoring all well designed mobile sites. When Google reprocesses a web site for mobile phones, they deceive the originating web server about the nature of the device making the web page request. If a publisher has built web facilities that differentiate Nokia phones from Samsungs from Blackberries, Google bypasses those facilities entirely. If the publisher has different information to offer owners of different mobile phones, or from different carriers, or based on whether it’s day or night at the location of the user, Google censors it out — every minute of every day. (For the nerdier ones here, it’s user agent spoofing by proxy on a huge and evil scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent#User_agent_spoofing )Secondly, this quote of [Mike Masnick's] is simply untrue: “If you feel that Google is causing too much trouble for you, then you can block them.” You can’t block Google from finding you on the mobile web without blocking them from finding you for desktop users too — which isn’t viable for hundreds of thousands of small e-commerce and information businesses that depend on AdSense or organic search to survive.
Please join me in contacting the Mobilcious team to let them know that they are helping Google make the mobile web a lame extension of the “regular” web, rather than the great new environment that it can be. While we’re at it, anyone know how to get some accountability out of Google?
[...] P.S. Scott continues with the topic on his blog with Garbage 2.0 In, Garbage 2.0 Out. [...]
[...] P.S. Scott continues the conversation with ‘Garbage 2.0 In, Garbage 2.0 Out‘. [...]
[...] Garbage 2.0 In, Garbage 2.0 Out: “ [...]
[...] Russell Buckley has written an article over at MobHappy taking issue with how Google is re-purposing pages and asking for the search giant to cooperate more with content providers. Scott Rafer is also speaking out against Google Mobile and (by associate) Mobilicio.us in this article on his blog. [...]
[...] We found that not to be the case. In Scott Rafer’s words: To use WINKsite as a specific example, Google Mobile Search ignores the mobile site that took our founders years of hard work and which is now a global mobile community used by tens of thousands of people every day. Instead, Google Mobile Search uses our standard web homepage, rips it apart, and sends it to people’s mobile phones as 15 crappy pages of unintelligible garbage. [...]
[...] If you enter the URL into a mobile phone it automatically mobilizes the content so that it is easier to read (which is a plus here, but a disaster on many other websites that have already been optimized by the site’s original authors- and a topic about which I will post on shortly). [...]
[...] I’m happy to hear that Dave managed to get Google to stop mangling the WINKsite pages after searches, but definitely somewhat troubled by the process he had to go through. I agree with what Scott had to say about the issue in general. I don’t really see it as censorship or predatory behavior necessarily. The problem is that Google doesn’t automatically pass through to the mobile site when one exists, so they can be seen as hijacking the browser to a degree. It’s just bad web etiquette to return your own stuff when you can link off to existing workable stuff. I personally view it very much the same as framing. It’s bad manners to frame someone elses site unless you have a reason to. And it should be bad manners to stick your transcoding engine in between the user and the end website if you could realistically just link off to an existing mobile version. That’s it. I’m not going to comment on the advertising or the censorship issues or the rights of publishers or anything else. It’s just bad manners in general, independent of any other issues. So I hope Google figures out how to fix it and does so. [...]
While I don’t make a living producing online content, I have to respectfully disagree with your argument from a technical standpoint.
The problem with mobile phones is that they generally have shitty browsers. They aren’t nearly as robust as even poor HTML browsers in the PC world. So, while it is understandably irratating to see your bastardized HTML site showing up instead of your perfect mobile version, you should realize that you are one of the few doing things properly.
Most sites aren’t even optimized for the PC world, let alone mobile. Google (and really any site that tries to mobilize content) has to target the 90%, not the 10% who do things properly.
It would be nice of them to at least leave a link to the non-transcoded version. Perhaps that’s the solution you should be pushing towards?
Pardon the delay in responding, but copyright violations and censorship are cut and dry issues. Google’s commercial needs (i.e. “targeting the 90%”) have nothing to do with it. They have no legal right to create derivatives of copyright holders works in order to make more money.
Yes, mobile browsers are primitive, and most site owners don’t know how to package for mobile. However, the site owners that have made the effort have done so for a reason. It is not up to any company or government to take those publishers work and throw it out the window. There are easy (though moderately expensive) technical solutions for google, aol, yahoo, etc. to link their mobile search returns pages to mobile-optimized sites as is and to transcode the rest. If they want to move into mobile search, then they need to make the necessary investment to not break the law as they launch those businesses.