Google has announced it’s in the midst of developing a new feature that’ll be built into its search results function over the course of the next few weeks. ‘Search Compatibility,’ will indicate if a webpage is going to face a problem when being viewed on particular Android and iOS mobile devices, including smartphones, iPhones, tablets and iPads.

‘A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page’s contents,’ writes Google in a post on its Webmaster blog.

‘We will now indicate to searchers when our algorithms detect pages that may not work on their devices. For example, Adobe Flash is not supported on iOS devices or on Android versions 4.1 and higher, and a page whose contents are mostly Flash may be noted like this:

Google’s main purpose for this development is its desire to encourage all website developers and content creators to adapt their online pages to function on all types of devices by switching to HTML5 as it’s a universally supported platform that’s accepted by just about any device that has access to the internet.

To assist webmasters on their mission to redesign and alter their websites to work on currently unsupported handsets, Google has announced two new resources: Web Fundamentals and Web Starter Kit. Both of these services are primarily designed to bring current websites up to the latest web standard by allowing a Googlebot to crawl a website and identify its weaknesses.

We’d love to know what you think of Google’s latest feature. Is it good or bad? Will it improve the quality of searching the web? Be sure to let us know in the comments section down below.

• SourceWebmaster Blog