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On the contrary, I think this shows that they do care about the user experience on your site. I'm not sure what you define "mobile friendly" as, but a lot of s

On the contrary, I think this shows that they do care about the user experience on your site. I'm not sure what you define "mobile friendly" as, but a lot of sites that haven't made much of an effort to cater to mobile users suck on a phone. A 200px sidebar fixed to side of a viewport works great on a laptop - not so much on a phone. Miniscule text isn't very friendly either (and no, zooming isn't really a great alternative). HackerNews is, as far as I'm aware, working on a responsive redesign of sorts. Reading the recently released API docs, the API would help this by reducing the reliance upon HN's HTML for people scraping the site because of the lack of another data source.

z3t4 12y ago
I do not think an automatic web scraper can decide what's "mobile friendly" or not. The HN site was just fine before they decided to do what Google classifies as mobile friendly - totally ruining my experience browsing HN. You shouldn't design a web page to satisfy Google, you should design it to satisfy your users. Even Google itself has said that. But yet they force Webmasters to make certain changes, and in some cases like HN, making the mobile experience much worse.
- thomasfoster96 12y ago
  I'd think Google are capable of making a web scraper that can have a very good guess. Plus, it's not really Google's fault that a website isn't usable - that's something the website developers are responsible for.
- geoah 12y ago
  Google (and others) have automatic scrappers that check if the colors are different enough to be readable. They certainly can check if the content is visible on a specific screen width, that horizontal scrollbars do not appear and that the touch event is properly handled etc etc etc.
  - z3t4 12y ago
    Today I received another letter for a site that has a separate mobile page. It appears that the Google bot is unable to find the mobile version. I highly doubt Google check CSS to find colors - they probably just check for <font> tags. Google and other search engines are incredibly easy to hack. Do you seriously think they render every site they crawl!? That said, Google is still the best search engine. They have just become Too greedy, forcing Webmasters into design paradigms. Just because they saw an increase in ad revenue doing so. Witch probably had nothing to do with the design change - people probably just spent a bit more on adwords after receiving the warning.

z3t4 12y ago

I do not think an automatic web scraper can decide what's "mobile friendly" or not. The HN site was just fine before they decided to do what Google classifies as mobile friendly - totally ruining my experience browsing HN. You shouldn't design a web page to satisfy Google, you should design it to satisfy your users. Even Google itself has said that. But yet they force Webmasters to make certain changes, and in some cases like HN, making the mobile experience much worse.

thomasfoster96 12y ago
I'd think Google are capable of making a web scraper that can have a very good guess. Plus, it's not really Google's fault that a website isn't usable - that's something the website developers are responsible for.
geoah 12y ago
Google (and others) have automatic scrappers that check if the colors are different enough to be readable. They certainly can check if the content is visible on a specific screen width, that horizontal scrollbars do not appear and that the touch event is properly handled etc etc etc.
- z3t4 12y ago
  Today I received another letter for a site that has a separate mobile page. It appears that the Google bot is unable to find the mobile version. I highly doubt Google check CSS to find colors - they probably just check for <font> tags. Google and other search engines are incredibly easy to hack. Do you seriously think they render every site they crawl!? That said, Google is still the best search engine. They have just become Too greedy, forcing Webmasters into design paradigms. Just because they saw an increase in ad revenue doing so. Witch probably had nothing to do with the design change - people probably just spent a bit more on adwords after receiving the warning.