Some time ago FlightStats.com got the magical and much coveted Internet Cloak of Invincibility: Google decided to make her search results more R0X0r, and now lists FlightStats as #1 for every Flight Status search on Google.
FlightStats.com's Special Google Result
Unfortunately, when searching for flight statuses from a modern mobile phone such as an Iphone or G1 Google Phone, the user experience goes out the window.
Try searching for a flight status on your mobile phone (the flight has to be in progress, so you may have to try a couple of times to get the special result), once you click through to FlightStats.com, how many pages of Ads do you have to go through? SEVEN. SEVEN PAGES OF ADS. Thanks to Scott’s quick response, the number of pages has now been reduced to 4-6 pages.
- Mobile Homepage – You click the result and are redirected to the mobile homepage
- “Choose how you want to check your flight” page
- “Enter the Airline code and Flight #” page
- “Didn’t know the obscure Airline code? No problem just read through some more ads and select one here” page
- “Re-Enter the Airline Code and Flight #” page -FIXED!
- “This flight has multiple segments! Choose which segment you are interested in while you read more ads” page
- “Oh hey, here’s that flight status you searched for 5-7 pages ago!” page
This is not quite in keeping with Google’s “Send users right to the content” manifesto.
Google, (I’m speaking to the living breathing entity, as he/she 
will be the first one to read this), please, I implore you, throw your weight around with these guys, and if they dont budge why not direct your firehose at another equally deserving site.
UPDATE 04-09-2009 – Scott, from Flightstats.com, was nice enough to include some feedback and insights on this mobile redirect problem, below in the comments. Its always good to know a company is interested in user feedback on the web.
#1 by Scott Hopkins on April 3, 2009 - 2:08 pm
I wanted to clear up a couple items in your post. First of all, we originally started working with Google for their mobile product. Do a search for a flight at http://www.google.com/mobile/default/search.html. Google is showing quite a lot of information in the results and there is very litttle reason for you to click through to us. It addition, it includes a deep link to the right spot in our mobile site.
The OneBox solution from Google deep links to our regular website. Our regular website has a mobile re-direct built into it. Independent of any referral traffic, we had a lot of people coming to our regular website with mobile devices and not enjoying the experience. Not only was the website experience slow and horrible on mobile device, but they were also presented with more ads and in a lot larger sizes. Most of the users were not aware of our mobile site. So last December we added a redirect.
It is worth noting that the vast majority of people that come to FlightStats.com via the Google OneBox solution are not using mobile browsers. For those that are, I agree that the redirect experience could be nicer. Instead of taking you to the home page it should take you to appropriate flight status result. Due to lack of resources at the time and since (not due to greed), we took a quick and simple approach to get users to the mobile site. It is our intent to make the experience better for people coming through links. While ad revenue is obviously important to us, so is the user experience. We have a ton of projects going on, so it just has not made it to the top of our list yet.
As for the steps you had to go through to get a flight result, you are obviously showing the longest amount of steps. Step 5 is a bug and will be fixed. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. Beyond that, typing a single segment flight with the right airline code and flight number would reduce the number of pages to 4. We have discussed revising the mobile home page to get the flight status searches back on page 1, so that the page in step 2 can be eliminated. We have not done that yet. If you have other suggestions on how to improve the user experience, we’d love to hear them. My e-mail address is scotth@flightstats.com. Constructive criticism of our products is always welcome and many suggestions from our customers have been implemented in our products.
Finally, the overall point of your article is incorrect. We are not unsatisfied with our Google one box solution. We do enjoy the referral traffic we get from it, though your statement about it being a “firehose” is a bit misleading. A much larger majority of the traffic from Google to our website comes from regular SEO on more popular flight related search terms.
We definitely have not gotten more greedy. We did not purposely do this to make more money. We make more money per page on our website than we do on the mobile site. We are interested in making the user experience more friendly and as resources become available we will do so.
Scott Hopkins
http://www.flightstats.com
#2 by Scott Hopkins on April 3, 2009 - 2:42 pm
I wanted to clear up a couple items in your post. First of all, we originally started working with Google for their mobile product. Do a search for a flight at http://www.google.com/mobile/default/search.html You will first notice that Google is showing quite a lot of information in the results and there is very litttle reason for you to click through to us. It addition, it includes a deep link to the right spot in our mobile site.
The regular Google Search deep links to our regular website. Google implemented it this way. We provide both mobile and website links in our feed to them. Our regular website has a mobile re-direct built into it. We had quite a few people hitting our site with mobile devices and not enjoying the experience. Not only was the website experience slow and horrible on mobile device, but they were also presented with a larger number of ads and in a lot larger sizes. Most of the users were not aware of our mobile site. So last December we added a redirect.
I agree that the redirect experience could be nicer for folks coming to the site via deep links. Instead of taking you to the home page it should take you to appropriate mobile application. Due to lack of resources at the time and since (not due to greed), we took a quick and simple approach to get users to the mobile site. It is our intent to make the experience better for people coming through links. While ad revenue is obviously important to us, so is the user experience. We have a ton of projects going on, so it just has not made it to the top of our list yet.
As for the steps you had to go through to get a flight result, you are obviously showing the longest amount of steps. Step 5 is a bug and will be fixed. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. Beyond that, typing a single segment flight with the right airline code and flight number would reduce the steps to 4. We have discussed revising the mobile home page to get the flight status searches back on page 1, so that the page in step 2 can be eliminated. We have not done that yet. If you have other suggestions on how to improve the user experience, we’d love to hear them. My e-mail address is scotth@flightstats.com. Constructive criticism of our products is always welcome and many suggestions from our customers have been implemented in our products.
Finally, the overall point of your article is incorrect. We are not unsatisfied with our Google one box solution. We do enjoy the referral traffic we get from it, though your statement about it being a “firehose” is a bit misleading. A much larger majority of the traffic from Google to our website comes from regular SEO on more popular flight related search terms.
We definitely have not gotten more greedy. We did not purposely do this to make more money. We make more money per page on our website than we do on the mobile site. We are interested in making the user experience more friendly and as resources become available we will do so.
I hope this helps clarify things a bit for you.
Scott Hopkins
http://www.flightstats.com
#3 by admin on April 9, 2009 - 1:05 pm
Thanks for the response Scott,
It’s always good to know a company cares about what its users think, and I can tell by your well-thought-out response that Flightstats.com does care.
Thats awesome that you fixed the bug with step 5, I will revise the post to include this (and a generally more constructive tone.)
As for the mobile redirect, it looks like you guys are using Java server technology, so here are a few lines of code to include on the flight-specific stats page that might fix the mobile redirect problem:
< %
if(MOBILE USER AGENT CHECK HERE) {
String id = request.getParameter( "id" );
response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_MOVED_TEMPORARILY);
String newLocn = "http://mobile.flightstats.com/go/Mobile/flightStatusByFlightProcess.do?id="+id;
response.setHeader("Location",newLocn);
}
%>
#4 by JamesD on June 11, 2009 - 10:06 am
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting