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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean they'll block youtube? Try playing a video on a phone that does not have the youtube app installed, it's just about impossible to get it right, it's a roulette that's rigged with more than half the links going to the youtube app page on google play. Highly annoying since there is no reason why the youtube page of some video should even have that app installation link at all.

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I think it's possible that they will penalize youtube. Previously Google's Webspam team manually penalized Google Chrome's site, so it didn't even rank for the search term "browser".

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-penalizes-chrome/3...

Google is coming around on the issue, thanks in part to their study showing 69% of users abandoning the site at the interstitial: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/07/google-ca...

I sure hope so. Google has been a pretty bad offender across the board as far as pushing users to install their mobile apps: https://twitter.com/mdudas/status/638792939842469893/photo/1

Even more extreme is that every single time I click a link in a hangouts chat on iOS, it asks me if I want to download Chrome.

Exactly. And, even worse, when trying to play the video on youtube on mobile, I often get "this video is not available in embed mode, please click here to go to youtube, and it reloads the same page -.-

Are mobile devs not eating their own cooking anymore? I can't do anything on a smartphone anymore, outside of some very well worn ruts, that doesn't involve encountering some annoyance like this somewhere between twice an hour to every other minute.

Are you using native apps or mobile web?

Surely it's obvious what he's referring to.

Even if you try living your whole smartphone life inside native apps (which would be sad), you inevitably get sent out to the web via links. Opening in your phone's browser or through the native web view.

The native "web view" is often an inadequate browsing experience, and will have the same annoyances as the full browser anyway, only worse because it's a cut-down version of a browser, tethered to the native app that doesn't want you straying too far.

To the point about dev's eating their own cooking. It's a fair question, but one I think increasingly is about project managers and non-developer stakeholders calling the shots on things because "everyone's an expert" in the web dev kitchen.

Of course not. Have you tried using twitter via mobile web? Stuff is broken all the time. They clearly view the site as leadgen for their applications.

If your rooted, install XDA's framework, they have some youtube modules that give you back control over how youtube works on your device, period!

Also Gmail just after you log in. Don't know if that counts. The link to skip is tiny and looks like a privacy notice link.

Is that an android thing? I only have iOS and cannot recognize that at all.

I use both iOS and Android and I experience the problem pretty often, regardless of which mobile OS I'm using. It might actually be more common on iOS since there are more apps in the App Store than in Play Store, however I don't have numbers backing my guess. In either case it's very annoying, as this type of interstitial prevents you from accessing the content. As the article explains, small install banners at the top of the page as still OK (and honestly I'm OK with that too).

Yes, most likely they will downrank youtube until the youtube team fixes it

And still embed YouTube results in the search...

The EU investigation committee is going to love this.

I also see non-YouTube videos embedded in search. I believe they'll embed videos from any site so long as they're marked up properly or in a video sitemap.

Isn't this a different thing? Aren't you talking about links which the phone recognise as YouTube links and open the app for you? While the article is talking about popups.

Hopefully they'll move their own products to use the solution built into mobile chrome [0]. I hope that this "official" way of prompting users isn't penalised. The engagement logic is in the browser and as a developer you can't override it and force it to show. It makes testing it interesting! I dug into the code and wrote up my findings in a couple of blog posts [1].

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing...

[1] https://unop.uk/dev/experience-with-mobile-chrome-app-instal...

Edit: In case it's not clear, this isn't just for web apps. As of at least a month ago (Chrome 44) you can add native app install banners to a website [2].

[2] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing...

Same thing for Google Calendar. You'll have to hunt for the tiny 'I'm one of those people that is perfectly happy with the website, please skip this crap' link somewhere in a tiny font in a hidden corner of the interstitial.

I hope so. This is why I don't bother watching youtube videos on my phone anymore...

God I hope so. Along with penalizing YouTube for throwing JavaScript errors because they can't figure out how to connect to the Chromecast correctly.

"Do as I say, not as I do."

Relevant: https://twitter.com/danbarker/status/439125570115223552

Also somewhat relevant: https://twitter.com/lutherlowe/status/638843261860343808

Read all of that tweet and you'll find out how irrelevant it is.

I fail to see how providing a short except that is fully attributed and links back to the original source is a problem. If anything, it steers even more traffic to wikipedia.

knowledge graph indeed steers traffic away from Wikipedia: http://searchengineland.com/businesses-knowledge-graph-domin...

luckily the foundation hasn't seen a negative impact on donations.

I suspect that's because for the most part it just siphons off the traffic that would have mostly been a waste to serve anyway, being that they were either looking for such a small bit of information to be encapsulated in the excerpt, or they determined they were looking for something else, they would be hard to monetize. Then again, I could be wrong or there could be usefulness to users hitting the end site that isn't directly monetizable (brand awareness).

I wonder what percentage of the knowledge graph result excerpts are full entries, and don't trail off indicating more can be found on the source site.

Not saying you're wrong, but one strength of Wikipedia is the density of internal links, which even the summaries are full of.

Perhaps some users would explore a topic if they saw their many options to do so.

This is just pure speculation, though.

I think by now most people in the English speaking world know that if they want to start getting more depth on a topic then Wikipedia is a decent place to start. However, sometime you just want a quick summary/single fact.

Except google _has_ punished its own sites before, so calling them hypocrites so early seems a bit too trigger-happy to me

yeah, especially annoying as they made provisions in their own browser to cheat on certain pages (like google homepage not needing permission to access the microphone)

double scary since it seems google is in a position now to steer (or probably 'make it better for users', in their view) the whole www just by tweaking page ranks

How else do you open YouTube on your phone? :-)

By opening the web browser and surfing to youtube.com :D

is this true on iPhone as well?

No. I never use the YouTube app on my iphone. I always play a video by doing:

Chrome app -> youtube.com (no prompt to install/switch to YouTube app, simply redirects me to m.youtube.com) -> search video -> play (which plays out of chrome and does not switch). The whole process is exactly how I'd hope/expect it to be.

I've exclusively used Youtube through the chrome app instead of the Youtube app because a few years ago I found that the search results were significantly worse/more heavily filtered through the Youtube app for some reason and never used it again.

Yes. If you have the app installed infuriatingly persistent, less so if you dont. Not having the app installed means you have to deal with the terrible youtube web player (which doesn't even use native fullscreen!).

gmail.com does the same thing, and it's super annoying.

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