– Contested impact –
While it threatens to throw websites that have not been adapted to smartphone technology to the bottom of search rankings, the change introduced Tuesday has yet to cause the major impact experts had predicted.
“I observed absolutely no impact” on Tuesday said Benoit Sillard, director of leading French publisher CCM Benchmark, 40 percent of whose finance, women’s and news magazines online visits are via mobile.
“It will take at least a week before we see an initial impact, as the algorithm is going through a learning phase,” said Paul Amsellem, who heads a marketing, technology and mobile phone advertising firm, the Mobile Network Group.
Amsellem believes “Google has just lost its mobile search bet” by placing unrealistic – and ultimately unfulfilled – hopes in websites shifting over to mobile platforms en masse.
Mobile phone applications pioneered by Apple are still coming out on top in the race for the Internet throne.
Apple had placed its bets very early in the game on mobile phone downloads, Amsellem said, giving the technology icon the lead by taking control of applications, content and graphics, making users’ experience “the best it can be”.
Google’s Android apps are also hugely popular, but they tend to be less user-friendly than their Apple competitors.
Google risks losing users if its search results are not adequately adapted. It may even lose out in revenues from advertising and sponsored links – the company’s main source of money.
And Google earns less anyway if users go straight to apps, rather than use the search engine to get where they want to go.
Ultimately, Google’s drastic move may mean users simply cannot find the site they’re looking for.
According to US magazine Techcrunch, 44 percent of Fortune 500 websites failed the search test, and another four percent of sites did not produce a result.
