More mobile news: Yahoo oneSearch- "Unable to adapt page for mobile browser" Google Search works just fine
By Vivek | March 27th, 2007 at 09:26 am ET
This is what I got when I tried browsing to my site on from Yahoo Mobile’s new offering oneSearch -”Unable to adapt page for mobile browser”. Just shows the hurry in which Yahoo teams implement solutions that can’t even deliver something so basic. It was only early morning today that Yahoo had announced its Mobile Publisher Services that will publishers with services including access to Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network, Mobile Content Engine, Mobile Media Directory and Mobile Site Submit. In a separate announcement Yahoo opened up Yahoo oneSearch to Mobile Publishers. All in all giving a clear signal to mobile publishers and content creators that Yahoo is all set to deliver their content onto the tiny mobile screens. Only problem is Yahoo back-end is not able to parse content from some of the most popular blogging platforms- Wordpress, and Vox, and just throws up the error above. I am not sure if this is a temporary issue, or the Yahoo team did not implement parsing for these platforms itself. Eitherway, can you really work with the Yahoo Mobile Ad Network when the your site doesn’t load in the first place? For consolation, blogs hosted on Blogger seem to come up just fine.
Moving over to Google, the search giant also announced the release of improved mobile interface and search capabilities. Blogs hosted on/using from Wordpress, Vox, and Blogger get parsed just fine. Besides that, just like Yahoo, Google had added options for Weather, Stock Quotes, News to be loaded when you bring up the mobile page, which might be seen as precursors to the likes of Widsets, and ZenZui. Google has incorporated local search into the regular search box that can cut down on the number of page loads to get the phone number.
One thing I am not really sure how ads on blogs from Admob and other mobile ad networks will work with the content parsers from Google and Yahoo, since the URLs for parsed site are from the search engines. As I am not using Admob, I will try digging around for more information on that.
on March 27th, 2007 at 11:08 am
This is Josh from AdMob. I thought I would point you to a Wordpress plugin created by Andy Moore (who is not affiliated with AdMob) that automatically creates a mobile-friendly version of your blog, with embedded AdMob ads. This will spare Yahoo and Google the trouble of transcoding. It is freely available at www.andymoore.info/wordpress-mobile-plugin/
on March 27th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Thanks Josh. Seems like a recent plugin that will take sometime to mature. It would be better if you guys put out a script that can help developers distinguish mobile and web browsers more easily since it will benefit you more than anyone.
on March 27th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Hi Vivek, you may want to check out this PHP script: http://www.andymoore.info/php-to-detect-mobile-phones/
on March 29th, 2007 at 1:08 am
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