Into their version of the 21st century. And they want to accomplish this by degrading the search results for everyone using Google from their mobile devices.

No, that's not their criteria either. Their criteria is that the site has to adhere to a bunch of little things, like spacing between links, button sizes, etc. None of that has much to do with whether or not the page is shitty on a mobile device.

Because that would actually be useful.

That and the whole "real names" policy. I do believe that if Google hadn't tried forcing everyone into it, it would have been more popular.

But not with me. I used G+ for a while, but gave it up because of endless technical and usability problems.

He's saying that if your visitors are primarily coming from search engines, then your site can ignore what search engines want without harm because being downranked by them won't hurt you. Plenty of sites get most of their visitors from regular readers rather than from search engines.

Sites are able to choose not to use Google, by the way. It just takes a small edit to your robots.txt file to get Google to completely ignore your site.

I don't think google is a monopoly -- there are lots of other search engines who drive reasonable amounts of traffic. But they are certainly the Big Dog. Nonetheless, there is a three-way symbiotic relationship here. If Google pushes so hard that sites stop caring about their google rankings, then Google's relevance will fall. If enough people find Google to suck more than the alternatives, the Google's relevance will fall.

The beta is. Or was. I haven't looked at it in quite a while.

Yes, I agree. Designers wanting complete control over the page appearance are a plague on the face of the web. Some of the blame goes to CSS as well -- at least the earlier versions of it -- as it made it extremely difficult to have multiple columns without also requiring a fixed page width.

True, but you don't have to install an app. I've only tried a small selection of those apps, but 100% of the ones I have looked at want ridiculous device permissions. That's a nonstarter.

Perhaps so, but two thoughts occur to me about this. First, there are very, very few "good" mobile sites. They do exist, but only just barely. Second, I don't trust Google as an authority on what makes a site "good" or not.

Let me backtrack a little. Not never. In the old days, websites handled this sort of thing very well -- the reflows they did were helpful and didn't break the user experience. Somewhere along the line, though, website stopped doing this well, so now reducing the window size often breaks the usability.

Slashdot has this problem, especially the beta (the last time I tried it, anyway).

This is precisely what has made me hate "responsive design". When I resize my browser window, I never want the website layout to change because of it.

True, but it also means that the site is more painful to use on a desktop. I have developed an intense loathing for "responsive design" over time, as I usually read websites in a relatively small window, intentionally obscuring the parts of the site that I'm not interested in at the moment.

Sites that use "responsive design" interfere with doing that in a major way. Even worse, the "response" is often to reorganize the site in a way that effectively breaks it from a usability point of view. Slashdot itself is a good example of this.

If they know what they're doing, then why has the quality of their search results been consistently falling over the past few years?

And that's the problem. This assumption is 100% wrong for a lot of people, including myself. This action by Google will degrade, not enhance, the quality of search results for me.

I very much like this solution.