These kinds of app install ads are a bad search experience, says Google. Photo: Google

More and more these days, mobile websites will pop up a prompt to download an app associated with the site. This “app install interstitial” hides most of the actual web page and bugs users to essentially stop browsing the web and head to an app store and install an app. App install prompts suck.

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

As of Tuesday, web masters can use Google’s updated Mobile-Friendly Test page or Google’s mobile usability tools to find out if they have any offending pages.

Android may have a larger share of the smartphone market than iOS, but Apple’s Safari browser is still king of the mobile web. According to the latest market share data from Net Applications, Safari accounted for 61.79% of the mobile web traffic throughout March.

Android and iOS users will now be able to quickly access the places they have searched for on Google thanks to Google’s new “Recent” icon on their mobile search page. Any user who has Web History enabled and is logged into Google when searching for a place will have that search saved and accessible via the “Recent” icon. Searches will be saved for approximately 24-hours and will give users the convenience of starting searches from their desktop and later pulling up that information while mobile.