Google embraces 'mobile-friendly' sites in search shake-up

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is about to change the way its influential search engine recommends websites on smartphones and tablets in a shift that's expected to sway where millions of people shop, eat and find information.

The revised formula, scheduled to be released Tuesday, will favor websites that Google defines as "mobile-friendly." Websites that don't fit the description will be demoted in Google's search results on smartphones and tablets while those meeting the criteria will be more likely to appear at the top of the rankings — a prized position that can translate into more visitors and money.

Although Google's new formula won't affect searches on desktop and laptop computers, it will have a huge influence on how and where people spend their money, given that more people are relying on their smartphones to compare products in stores and look for restaurants. That's why Google's new rating system is being billed by some search experts as "Mobile-geddon."

"Some sites are going to be in for a big surprise when they find a drastic change in the amount of people visiting them from mobile devices," said Itai Sadan, CEO of website-building service Duda.

It's probably the most significant change that Google Inc. has ever made to its mobile search rankings, according to Matt McGee, editor-in-chief for Search Engine Land, a trade publication that follows every tweak that the company makes to its closely guarded algorithms.

Here are a few things to know about what's happening and why Google is doing it.

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MAKING MOBILE FRIENDS

To stay in Google's good graces, websites must be designed so they load quickly on mobile devices. Content must also be easily accessible by scrolling up and down — without having to also swipe to the left or right. It also helps if all buttons for making purchases or taking other actions on the website can be easily seen and touched on smaller screens.

If a website has been designed only with PC users in mind, the graphics take longer to load on mobile devices and the columns of text don't all fit on the smaller screens, to the aggravation of someone trying to read it.

Google has been urging websites to cater to mobile device for years, mainly because that is where people are increasingly searching for information.

The number of mobile searches in the U.S. is rising by about 5 percent while inquiries on PCs are dipping slightly, according to research firm comScore Inc. In the final three months of last year, 29 percent of all U.S. search requests — about 18.5 billion — were made on mobile devices, comScore estimated. Google processes the bulk of searches — two-thirds in the U.S. and even more in many other countries.

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BRACING FOR CHANGE

To minimize complaints, the company disclosed its plans nearly two months ago. It also created a step-by-step guide (http://bit.ly/1GyC0Id ) and a tool to test compliance with the new standards (http://bit.ly/1EVi9R3 ).

Google has faced uproar over past changes to its search formula. Two of the bigger revisions, done in 2011 and 2012, focused on an attempt to weed out misleading websites and other digital rubbish. Although that goal sounds reasonable, many websites still complained that Google's changes unfairly demoted them in the rankings, making their content more difficult to find.

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STILL CAUGHT OFF GUARD

While most major merchants and big companies already have websites likely to meet Google's mobile standard, the new formula threatens to hurt millions of small businesses that haven't had the money or incentive to adapt their sites for smartphones.

"A lot of small sites haven't really had a reason to be mobile friendly until now, and it's not going to be easy for them to make the changes," McGee said.

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BURYING HELPFUL CONTENT

Google's search formula weighs a variety of factors to determine the rankings of its results. One of the most important considerations has always been whether a site contains the most pertinent information sought by a search request.

But new pecking order in Google's mobile search may relegate some sites to the back pages of the search results, even if their content is more relevant to a search request than other sites that happen to be easier to access on smartphones.

That will be an unfortunate consequence, but also justifiable because a person might not even bother to look at sites that take a long time to open or difficult to read on mobile devices, Gartner analyst Whit Andrews said.

"Availability is part of relevancy," Andrews said. "A lot of people aren't going to think something is relevant if they can't get it to appear on their iPhone."

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Breaking even tough to do in Boston market

On the fence about renting or buying a home? A new analysis compares the costs and how long you would have to live in a home to rationalize the upfront expense of buying it.

In the Boston metro area, buying makes more financial sense if you plan to stay put for at least 3.4 years. That's how long it would take to break even — for the cumulative costs of renting the same home to exceed the purchase costs, according to Zillow, a Seattle online real estate database company.

Boston has the fourth longest break-even rate among the top 35 U.S. metro areas, behind Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Diego.

"The break-even horizons are historically very low," said Svenja Gudell, Zillow's senior director of economic research. "The rule of thumb is if you're going to buy a house, stay in it at least five years. A lot of (break-even rates) we're seeing across the country are lower than that."

Of Boston and Cambridge neighborhoods, Roxbury has the shortest break-even rate at one year, compared to 7.2 years in Beacon Hill. In the middle are West Roxbury at 3.7 years and North Cambridge at 4 years.

The current lower break-even rates are driven by home value appreciation rates that, while slowing, are still quite good, and very low mortgage rates and rising rents. Boston area home values appreciated 4 percent in the 12 months ending in February, while rents rose 5.2 percent.

Based on median household incomes and a 30-year fixed mortgage, Boston-area buyers can expect to spend 22 percent of their monthly income on a mortgage. Renters can expect to pay about 34 percent of their income on rent.

"Affordability is quite good on the for-sale side," Gudell said. "It's not looking so good right now for renters."

Home ownership brings a lot of benefits.

"One of the biggest things is being able to collect equity in your house," Gudell said. "It's like a ginormous savings account for you. But it also brings along a lot of responsibility."

Buyers need to determine the monthly payment they can afford for principal, interest, taxes and insurance, said Norwell financial planner Dan Galli, president of the Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts. Keeping those payments to 26 to 28 percent of gross income and keeping total debt to 33 to 34 percent is a good start, he said.

"The challenge is the down-payment and … whether you can get the 20 percent to avoid (private mortgage insurance), or whether you can catch some sort of first-time home buyers program to perhaps let you put a smaller amount down," Galli said.

Dan Walsh, sales manager for William Raveis Real Estate in Boston, advises consulting a qualified mortgage advisor. "A lot of people think if you're buying a $500,000 condo, that they need to put down 20 percent or $100,000," Walsh said. "They might be able to put down 5 percent or less with great credit and still get good rates. And they're also locking in historically low rates, so if they're going to be there for a long time, it's to their advantage."

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Top 3 bond rating agencies give Massachusetts high marks

BOSTON — The nation's top three bond rating agencies are giving Massachusetts a clean bill of fiscal health.

State Treasurer Deb Goldberg said Thursday that Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch have maintained their ratings for the state and affirmed stable economic outlooks ahead of Massachusetts' next competitive bond offering.

The state has held its current rating — one notch below the top possible rating and the highest in state history — since September 2011.

The ratings are largely based on four factors: the state's economy; financial position; debt and financial management; and long-term liabilities.

While Massachusetts has relatively a high level of debt, that's due in part by the heavier role the state takes in the financing of local projects, often handled at the county level in other states.

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Public needs drive plans: Developers think beyond garage lot

Redevelopment proposals for the city-owned Winthrop Square garage feature impressive soaring skyscrapers that would reach new architectural heights in Boston's Financial District, but their mixed uses and public bene­fits are what's garnering kudos.

Plans include retail, restaurant, residential, hotel and innovation economy office uses to bring around-the-clock activity to the square, with other public benefits ranging from an entrepreneur innovation center to a public school.

"What impressed me about many of them were they just weren't about the building," said architect Tim Love, a Utile Inc. principal and Boston Society of Architects president. "They were thinking about Winthrop Square and that whole little neighborhood there, and they had a lot of positive things to offer."

Since the garage is city-owned, public benefits stand to carry more weight in the competitive vetting process by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

"They certainly like public space," said David Begelfer, CEO of NAIOP Massachusetts, a commercial real estate development trade group. "They like the idea of energizing the ground-floor space. They want to tap into the whole Downtown Crossing and build on that."

How the buildings allow for public connections through long city blocks are among benefits the city should consider, according to Love. And hotel and residential uses — one or both of which are in all proposals — would help the Financial District become a 24-7, live-work neighborhood that would draw in more businesses, he said.

But stacking residential units over offices — as Trans National Properties, Lincoln Property Co., Millennium Partners and Lend Lease Development propose — is easier­ said than done, said John B. Hynes III, CEO of Boston Global Investors.

"There aren't a lot of successful examples," Hynes said. "To stack them vertically is a challenge. We went through that very exercise at One Franklin, then Vornado (Realty Trust) got cold feet on the residential and ... pulled the plug."

Still, he and Begelfer believe Steve Belkin's Trans National — which has had designs on the site since 2006 — has an edge over other teams because it can tie in its adjacent 133 Federal St. property. "We looked at (the site) at length 10 years ago maybe, before it went out to bid and Belkin got it (in 2006)," Hynes said. "It was clear even back then that the best use of that parking garage was to combine it with the Belkin site."

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Loss of Cape Wind sinks bid for marine terminal

A major port operator is no longer competing to run the state's New Bedford marine terminal — a $113 million taxpayer-­funded boondoggle — after the Cape Wind project folded.

"They had a good plan with the wind energy and that's really what we were banking on," said Frank Vannelli, senior vice president for commercial and business development at Logistec Corp. "But when the deal fell through, we just stepped back and we said, 'Let's take a look here at how we're spending our resources' and we decided to put it in a holding pattern."

Without Cape Wind as the main terminal tenant, a bid no longer made sense for Logistec, Vannelli said.

Executives with Cape Wind, who are planning to plant 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound, backed out of a two-year, $4.5 million deal to rent the 28-acre terminal after National Grid and Eversource terminated contracts to buy power from the wind project.

State officials have said a new lease is expected to fetch a lower price for the terminal, which is overbudget and months behind schedule.

Vannelli said the South Coast Marine Commerce Terminal could be conducive to smaller vessels with refrigerated goods, such as frozen fish and fresh fruit, because the area isn't optimal for larger container ships.

"Our organization is still very interested in what's going on in the port of New Bedford and I do think it has a role to play," he said. "I don't think that it's realistic to think that any of these smaller-sized ports would attract large container cargoes. The containers will go to the larger ports. They will go to New York. They will go to Boston."

The quasi-public Massachusetts Clean Energy Center plans to name a port operator by summer, but has yet to make public the three finalists.

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Seattle CEO to cut his pay so every worker earns $70,000

SEATTLE — A Seattle CEO who announced that he's giving himself a drastic pay cut to help cover the cost of big raises for his employees didn't just make those workers happy.

He's already gained new customers, too.

"We've definitely gained a handful of customers in the last day or two," said Stefan Bennett, a customer relations manager at Gravity Payments, a credit card payment processing firm. "We're showing people you can run a good company, and you can pay people fairly, and it can be profitable."

Dan Price, chief executive of the company, stunned his 100-plus workers on Monday when he told them he was cutting his roughly $1 million salary to $70,000 and using company profits to ensure that everyone there would earn at least that much within three years.

For some workers, the increase will more than double their pay. One 21-year-old mother said she'll buy a house.

At a time of increasing anger nationally over the enormous gap between the pay of top executives and their employees, the announcement received immense attention. But corporate governance professor David Larcker of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business said it's unclear if Price's unusual gesture will start a trend.

"It's an alternative way to think about a tough problem, and I give these guys a lot of credit for laying it out there," Larcker said. "Whether this would scale to a bigger organization, it's hard to know. But it's clever, it's interesting and it's fun to think about."

Washington state already has the nation's highest minimum wage at $9.47 an hour, and earlier this month Seattle's minimum wage law went into effect. It will eventually raise base hourly pay to $15.

Labor unions and workers in the Seattle area on Wednesday joined national protests for better pay. Drivers for Uber and Lyft — the app-based car-hailing services — gathered in Seattle, while airport workers rallied at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. In Seattle, police arrested 21 demonstrators who opted for civil disobedience to dramatize their point, refusing to move out of an intersection at the conclusion of their march.

Gravity's CEO launched the company from his dorm room at Seattle Pacific University when he was just 19. He's long taken a progressive approach that included adopting a policy allowing his workers to take unlimited paid vacation after their first year.

"I think this is just what everyone deserves," Price told workers in a video of Monday's announcement released by the company.

But he also acknowledged it won't be easy: The increased pay will eat into at least half the company's profits, he said, and he has no plans to simply raise rates on clients.

"It's up to us to find a way to make it work," he said.

Bennett, 28, went to college with Price and has worked for Gravity since graduation. He said he was already happy to work for a company that treats its employees and customers well in what he otherwise considers a predatory industry. For him, the raise will amount to about $10,000.

"I don't care as much about the money," he said. "But if I look at my colleagues, and what they talk about on a day-to-day basis and what their concerns are — just looking at their faces when Dan announced the pay increase, it was pretty phenomenal."

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Nokia confirms acquisition of French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent

Photo by: 

The Associated Press

FILE - This Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015 shows the Nokia head offices in Espoo, Finland. Nokia says it is in advanced discussions to acquire the French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent. In a brief statement Tuesday, the Helsinki-based mobile technology concern said the two companies are in advanced negotiations "with respect to a potential full combination which would take the form of a public exchange offer by Nokia for Alcatel-Lucent." (Roni Rekomaa/Lehtikuva via AP, File) FINLAND OUT

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Nokia confirms acquisition of French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent

Photo by: 

The Associated Press

FILE - This Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015 shows the Nokia head offices in Espoo, Finland. Nokia says it is in advanced discussions to acquire the French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent. In a brief statement Tuesday, the Helsinki-based mobile technology concern said the two companies are in advanced negotiations "with respect to a potential full combination which would take the form of a public exchange offer by Nokia for Alcatel-Lucent." (Roni Rekomaa/Lehtikuva via AP, File) FINLAND OUT

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Asia shares meander as China GDP data disappoints

TOKYO — European shares rose early Wednesday on expectations that European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi will douse speculation over a possible early exit from the ECB monetary stimulus program that is due to last until September 2016. Shares fell in Asia, however, after China reported its economy grew at a 7.0 percent annual rate in January-March, the slowest pace in six years.

KEEPING SCORE: Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.4 percent to 7,106.24 and Germany's DAX climbed 0.6 percent to 12,299.74. France's CAC 40 gained 0.7 percent to 5,253.07. Wall Street's outlook for the day was mixed, with S&P futures down 0.03 while Dow futures were trading 0.06 percent higher.

EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK: Despite glimmers of improvement on Europe's horizon, Draghi, the ECB head is expected to tell reporters the central bank for the 19-country region using the euro will stick with monthly bond purchases meant to raise inflation from an anemic 0.1 percent.

THE QUOTE: "Ahead of European trade, we are looking for mild gains in the major bourses," Stan Shamu, market strategist for IG, said in a commentary. He added that "Mario Draghi could make some positive commentary around signs of improvement in the economy."

CHINA DATA: China's economy cooled further as manufacturing and retail sales slowed in January-March, raising pressure on Beijing to keep the world's second-largest economy on track. Growth fell to 7 percent from the previous quarter's 7.3 percent, the weakest performance since it tumbled to 6.1 percent in the first quarter of 2009.

ASIA'S DAY: Japan's Nikkei 225 stock index fell 0.2 percent to 19,869.76. Hong Kong's Hang Seng recovered from early losses, gaining 0.2 percent to 27,618.82 and South Korea's Kospi gained 0.4 percent to 2,119.96. But the Shanghai composite index yoyo'd to end the day 1.2 percent lower at 4,084.16. In Australia, whose resource sector is vulnerable to fluctuations in Chinese demand, the S&P ASX/200 fell 0.6 percent to 5,908.40. Shares in Taiwan, New Zealand and most of Southeast Asia were also lower.

ENERGY: Benchmark U.S. crude rose 75 cents to $54.04 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It rose $1.38 to close at $53.29 a barrel on Tuesday. Brent crude, a benchmark for international oils used by many U.S. refineries, rose 57 cents to $60.38 a barrel in London.

CURRENCIES: The dollar rose to 119.57 yen from 119.45. The euro fell to $1.0575 from $1.0648.

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Deval Patrick named to Bain Capital

Former Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick will be joining the Boston firm Bain Capital — founded by former GOP Gov. Mitt Romney — to develop a line of so-called "social impact" investing to support causes from climate change to hunger.

A Bain spokesman confirmed the hire for the Boston Herald, but said all other questions, including whether Patrick can still do work for Boston 2024's Olympic bid, will be answered at today's formal announcement.

Patrick told The Boston Globe in an interview that the opportunity is "a chance to have real meaning and mission in my work."

Patrick will become one of Bain's managing directors, sharing in the profits of the firm. He will be the first African-American to take on that role at the firm.

Patrick was tapped to represent Boston 2024 as a 
"global ambassador" at a rate of $7,500 a day. But amid a public outcry over secrecy and hefty salaries for ex-Patrick administration officials hired by the nonprofit, Patrick said he was pursuing 
another job but would serve the bid as he was able for 
no pay.

Patrick served two terms as governor from 2006 to 2014.

He stated repeatedly as he was ending his tenure that he wasn't planning to run for president in 2016 and 
intended to go into the 
private sector.

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