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- Google Cares Not for your Intro
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-06-10-n16.html
You can now skip the flash or ad intro of some sites directly from the search results in Google. I'm waiting for the "don't use this site" link that takes you back to the Google home page ... or better yet clicks on a Google Adwords link somewhere.
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8 - Reply by clintob, Jun 11, 2008.
These monkeys are becoming tiresome and insufferable... someone stop them before they figure out a way to digitally sodomize people.
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233 - Reply by ccarpita, Jun 11, 2008.
Why are you two hating? Most of those intros suck! Any web page that makes you sit through some agonizing, poorly rendered animation to figure out their contact info deserves to be digitally sodomized. Plus, the link is small, and will only be clicked on by people who really don't want to see that trash.
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- Reply by clintob, Jun 11, 2008.
Despite my defense of Flash in general, I do not disagree that Flash intros are almost always painful at best and most are horribly executed. But it's just the principal of the thing... Google needs to be reined in.
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1245
- Reply by mark, Jun 11, 2008.
Yeah I don't defend flash intros, but like them or not these businesses spent money making them and they're part of the business model. To allow someone to skip right past them negates any possible advertising benefit. As clintob says It's really a principle thing.
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- Reply by ccarpita, Jun 11, 2008.
I just think this is the wrong thing to hate on Google for. They are doing most of us a service. If Google needs to be reigned in, it should be for the massive collection of personal data.
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- Reply by mark, Jun 11, 2008.
So what you're saying is that there's plenty to love and plenty to hate on. I think that's pretty accurate.
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92 - Reply by Sung, Jun 12, 2008.
I actually can't stand intros, especially ones that have music behind them. When I'm at work and I'm shopping for a tee shirts online, the last thing I need is for some cheesy clubby song to start playing to let the world know, I'm shopping online instead of staring at a mail queue.
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19 - Reply by SusieJ, Jun 12, 2008.
I use web search because it gets me directly to the page with the info I want, without my having to delve into a poorly-thought-out information architecture. If the target audience is using a search engine to bypass your navigation, it's time to re-think the navigation.
When I programmed in Visual Basic, our favorite technique for finding any info on the MS Developer Network about a specific error message was to ... search for the message in Yahoo, which would show the page we wanted (on MSDN) in the first set of results. MSDN's search was terrible, awful, frustrating and useless.
This is nothing new; it's just the brouhaha over deep linking again.
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- Reply by mark, Jun 13, 2008.
No, there's a distinct difference here, which is that providing a mechanism for skipping past advertising, for what is essentially an advertising company, should seem slightly shady.
We all hate ads but we learn to live with them because it makes the Internet free for us, which is basically what we have come to expect. @SusieJ, your usage of Yahoo to evade MSDN, while clever, is not exactly the same thing. It's not that a flash intro is difficult to click through (though sometimes there's some hunting for the "skip intro" link). The site behind that link may still in fact be nearly impossible to navigate, even if the information you want is indeed there.
Deep linking makes me cry sometimes, especially when looking for technical information or answers. One of the biggest problems is the proliferation of mailing list publishing sites. Very few threads are going to be relevant to what I'm looking for. I rarely find that my needs are served for very broad or very specific, technical queries. There's a lot of impotent hunting around, a lot of luck, and I have yet to find a single product that addresses this issue. (Maybe Snooth does for wine? But I'm biased so I'll leave that to someone else.)
