"If you can't run a business without advertising..."

Russell Buckley had a great post about a year ago called "Who gave Google permission to be the judge and jury of mobile content".   If you haven't read it, you should, but I'll summarize: Google alters users' mobile experience by repurposing content if you get to the page via Google mobile search or, as I learned in the scenario below, via Gmail on the phone's browser.  You may not have time to read the 55 comments that Russell's post generated, but there are some good  ones, including my favorite from a defender of Google.  In response to the possibility that Google might strip out ads, he wrote: "I don't want to see your ads.... If you can’t run a business without advertising, I don’t think you should bother."  Right on brother!

I stumbled into the issue Friday when our intern from last summer wrote on my wall in Facebook.  It was the first such post (feel free to go wild) and I was excited to get the message in my gmail while waiting for a flight at LAX.  When I clicked through to read it, I was required to login to Facebook but encountered a slight problem:  the entry forms were disabled so I couldn't enter a user id or password.   The fix exists: you just have to switch to regular html which Google allows you to do way down at the bottom, after of course it gives you the chance to bail out from this "broken" Facebook site back to Google home.

Google's biggest defenders like the one above who cite Google's obsessive history of improving the user experience probably can acknowledge a slip up now and then.  Yet it is easy to take issue with Google's general approach to the user and mobile when almost any mobile search you do on Google reveals exactly one ad and zero search results on the screen.  I'm not sure what kind of success Cellfire has in offering a free video on the mobile device, but you've got to appreciate the prime spot they get in results for an LA Restaurant.  Perhaps a more absurd example is the search for driving directions, where the first and only click on the screen is actually an ad for Mapquest called "Driving Directions".  Don't blame me for thinking that's actually a relevant search result!  It reminds me of that old saying they had at Google in the early years: "If you can't run a business without advertising..."