New-look Google to make some sites less appy

It’s the stuff of nightmares: you visit a website on your phone, and instead of showing the actual contents, a full-screen ad pops up demanding you download an app instead.

You try to close it but it’s so big that you’re redirected instead.

In very exciting news, Google will soon be starting to punish these pesky websites that display overly big redirecting advertisements to download an app.

Google will now be down-ranking sites with ads obscuring “a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page”.

“Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page,” a Google Webmaster post says.

Google has also had a bit of a makeover overnight, with a new logo being paraded out, which the animated ‘Doodle’ introduces with a hand that rubs out the old one.

It’s now utilising the sans-serif font, which changes everything, although it’s still the same four colours though, and the little blue G that’s used for Gmail and other mobile applications will now also be multi-coloured.

“These days, people interact with Google products across many different platforms, apps and devices – sometimes all in a single day,” a Google blog post says.

“Today we’re introducing a new logo and identity family that reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens.”

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