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They also sell full page ads now: https://support.google.com/adxseller/answer/6068103?hl=en

You are right. I think Google want people to get annoyed with this vignette ads if he or she uses google calendar. The user should install Google calendar the APP to be fully controlled by google. Then Google can just sends the user any ad what google like...

They all prefer user using apps rather than web pages. Google and others want to get fully control of users and make money...

> First results for searching 'calendar': http://i.imgur.com/l3A5Wlh.png

Well in your screenshot it seems like you scrolled down on the "calendar" search results. I get some other random thing ahead of Google Calendar, in incognito or not.

It is really annoying (I too hate those things, I would have installed the app if I wanted the app), but the click through thing only happens once in my testing. Are you clearing your cookies regularly?

I scrolled down because the top of the page was a Google Ad for Google Calendar. I chose to show the first organic result. Here's the top of the page: http://imgur.com/cO84ogZ.png

How about using a software to get rid of google ads?

I can erase google ads from DNS level. Users can never reach any google ad at all.

What you think?

Adaway was already invented ;)

The fact is they did penalize themselves for couple of times in history.

Mostly when obliged to do so.

They also said not to "penalize" websites based on user agent. Yet they do it and have been doing it for years.

They also said to use valid html/etc while they didn't do it for cost saving/performance reasons. Not sure this one is still true.

My guess is that this list of preaching water and drinking wine is pretty long for Google. I think their view is they know what they are breaking so it is OK in that particular case. The rest of us has to suck it up.

Yahoo shows YMail. Bing is the only one shows Gmail as first, although Yahoo technically uses Bing. You can pretty much say Yahoo actually "put herself above others" and more guilty than Google. In fact, I don't think Google is doing anything wrong. After all, Gmail is popular, and if you are doing a Google search, the user may be interested to know Google also offer email and most likely the user is already a Google user.

> You can pretty much say Yahoo actually "put herself above others"

Do you mean `itself`? Since when are tech companies assigned genders?

Parent poster might not be from an English-speaking background.

This. I would've written the same by mistake.

I am not, sort of. You can refer to a country by "she", so why is it inappropriate for a company? I don't see any issues. You can view a company as a mother too.

One of the reasons a country has feminine gender is the association with the motherland (ie. one's native country).

Not all countries have feminine gender, just check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland

I never thought about the question of whether, in languages that require nouns to have grammatical gender, particular countries may have a different grammatical gender from others, but on reflection I already know examples where they do in Portuguese: o Brasil, o Canadá (amusing to me because of the national anthem), but a Argentina, a Alemanha.

I wonder if this also happens in German; the only examples I'm thinking of offhand are feminine (die Schweiz, die Türkei) but now I'm not at all sure that there isn't a masculine one too!

Apparently Iraq, Iran, Yemen, the Congo, Lebanon, and Chad are masculine in German: https://german.yabla.com/lessons.php?lesson_id=409

Actually I can't think of many cases where German would use pronouns with countries. The reason these are masculine is because they are typically referred to using a definitive pronoun (literally "the Iraq", "the Iran", etc). It's more common with names of regions -- which may indicate that these countries used to be mere geographical regions (rather than sovereign nations) when the names entered the German language.

It also happens with countries like the UK, the US, the Czech Republic and so on, but obviously for the same reasons as in English.

I can't actually think of a country that's feminine in German. The "die" you often see is actually indicating plural (e.g. "die vereinigten Staaten", the United States; or "die Niederlande", "the Netherlands").

When you use pronouns for anaphora, would you use "es" for all countries, or is it plausible to imagine "er" or "sie", as with common nouns?

For example: Vor drei Monaten waren meine Mutter und ich in der Schweiz; wir haben _____ wirklich schön gefunden.

Would you accept "sie" here as a reference to Switzerland (because it was referred to as "die Schweiz"), or "es", or both? My intution is "es", but I'm not not a native speaker and non-native German speakers notoriously over-apply "es" to inanimate things.

I'd use "es" because it refers to the experience of being in Switzerland rather than the country itself.

But Switzerland is another example of a country that is typically used with an article. Consider the sentence "Ich fahre nach ____" with a country name. It doesn't work for countries like Switzerland ("nach Schweiz" sounds wrong, you'd instead say "in die Schweiz" -- same as "nach Kongo" vs "in den Kongo").

Thanks! Can we force the sentence to be about the country itself?

- Was meinen Sie über die Schweiz?

- ____ ist schön. / Ich finde ____ schön.

Several countries have articles in German, most don't. Plural countries (USA, UAE) have the plural article, which in the standard form is the same as the feminine article ("die") which makes for even more confusion, but when used in a case changes differently ("in den USA" vs "in der Schweiz") :)

Some feminine countries: Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, Mongolia, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, Central African Republic.

Male, in addition to your own list: Niger (!= Nigeria), Sudan, Vatican.

Neutral: UK (because kingdom is a neutral noun in German), potentially others

In their native tongues, sure. But we're not talking about Afrikaans or French, we're talking about English. And since Britannia is feminine, English would have developed with the word "motherland" representing the native country.

But if you have a child company, wouldn't you expect to associate the parent company with a feminine gender before a masculine gender? That's what I am getting at. An organization has that "motherland" feel in some way.

Not really, no. Motherland is a very specific term that's been ingrained into English most likely because of the close personal relationship between people and their native countries, which would have been Britannia for many English speakers when the language was developing. There isn't really that same deep and universal connection when talking about organizations, so a similar term probably wouldn't develop anytime soon.

Sure, but what about ships? If you've read any sci-fi, the term "mothership" should spring to your mind. Or "motherboard" in hardware.

The concept of "some larger entity that spawns smaller entities" seems to generally lend itself to the mother/daughter terminology if you want to be poetic about it.

That said, whatever happened to artistic liberties?

In Portuguese we also say motherland. I doubt it's a Saxon thing, given Portuguese is a Latin language.

That's an archaic and half-valid use, so stretching it to apply to a company makes it pretty much invalid.

You could try to convince people to use the word that way, but at present it's just not done. Companies are 'it' or you can talk about the people that make up the company as 'they'.

given that they are not a native speaker this seems over the top. Also maybe consider Sapir–Whorf before stating universal rules..

What? I'm talking about English, not universal rules. The non-native speaker is the one that shouldn't be making assertions about what phrases do or do not have 'issues'.

Also Sapir-Whorf is dumb.

If you try to dictate how language must be used you're just being ignorant of how she constantly evolves through her use by different speakers.

So, there.

I'm not. I'm merely pointing out that such a use is going against the way English has been changing over time.

English as she is spoke does this?

No offense meant but why not get the app?

I understand not wanting an application for a news website or something like that but something you use often like google calendar it would seem like the application would be better than the mobile page.

I do have the app. And that fact makes this double-annoying. When trying to visit a website, I'm told not to do that. That would be annoying on its own, and in fact it was for the first few years that it happened. But that's not at all what is frustrating me right now. What's super annoying is that Google claimed last year that they would penalize websites that do this, because they find it annoying too. Except they have done no such thing. I'm calling out Google's hypocrisy on who gets to show full-page ads without being penalized - Google does and nobody else?

If they want to show full-page ads and be super annoying, then fine, I'll deal with it. But don't pretend to be against it when you do the same practice yourself.

Why do you assume they're not being penalized?

Showing that they rank above "timeanddate.com" doesn't mean a lot.

Being ranked #1 in a Google search for 'calendar' does mean a lot. Also, let's say they are penalizing themselves, but the penalty isn't enough to change their ranking. Why, then, would they claim that they are making this change because it's better for users to not have these ads but to still run these ads themselves?

> Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the Web page.

https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/09/mobile-f...

This would imply that they know the experience is bad for users, they know that the penalty won't hurt their ranking, and so they will continue to show the bad experience regardless? That's just as bad as them not penalizing themselves for the full page ad.

A penalty that doesn't knock down one of the largest sites on the internet can still be a big deal to everyone else.

I assume different departments run calendar and search.

> I do have the app. And that fact makes this double-annoying.

It really just shows the sad state of mobile advertising when they're showing you ads for an app you already have.

On the other hand, I like that websites are unable to query my phone to find out what apps I have installed.

Yes I agree with you, I don't want any random website to be able to query my phone to find out what apps I have installed either.

However, if I'm on a specific app publisher's website, I wouldn't mind letting them know (through some mechanism) that I've already installed their specific app.

Sad state?

How do you expecet them to know all the apps installed on your phone? And if they DID know this information, people would be up in arms about privacy or lack there-of.

It's google. They know that you downloaded the app from the Play Store and used the app to connect to their servers directly. They already have plenty of information.

If they don't know it, they shouldn't make assumptions.

Yes, showing you an advertisement for an app you've already installed is bad UI/UX, regardless of the reason why. On the publisher side, it's also a wasted ad impression.

I don't expect them to know all the apps installed on my phone, nor do I think they need that much information to solve this particular problem.

Not if you want to allow attendees to edit your event.

This is missing from the android app. So you have to browse to the calendar on the web and ... this.