Now that MWC has passed and we're temporarily freed of the metabolism it imposes on us (and the entire industry), it's time to report on what we've been up to.
We've been adding some new features to find.mobi. The biggest new feaure is one that is not immediately apparent to the eye: a much bigger index of mobile web content. We did this with a delicate blend of brute force and subtlety:
- We added a lot of extra machines to our crawler cluster
- We changed our mobile page detection algorithm to be much more careful about CSS and some other page elements that can trick a crawler into thinking a page is mobile friendly when actually isn't, while at the same time relaxing some of our page hygiene tests
The net effect of these changes has been to expand our list of known-good pages severalfold while simultaneously removing many non-mobile pages that had slipped through our filters.
We also added some less technically challenging but nonetheless useful features also: special case searches for airline flights, stock ticker symbols and currency codes. You can see some examples above. Implementing these features wasn't exactly rocket science but they're useful for people on the move.
If you want to make sure that we crawl your site, the easiest way to do it is to submit it for testing to ready.mobi – we will pick it up and crawl it next time around.
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