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People Trust Yahoo! and Google For the Brands
amigoro writes "Here's an interesting experiment: Copy Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries. Tell 32 test subjects who are going to evaluate the results that the results were from four different search engines: Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then see which ones they rate as the best. As it turns out Google and Yahoo! win hands down, proving that even on the Internet it's all about branding."
Well, google and yahoo are much like Cocacola and Pepsi... MSN is always giong to be the live.com though. Just doesnt taste right... kind of bitter.
Why UNIX?
Thanks for that study my friends.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
One could easily give credit to the results of past performance. Yahoo was the #1 search engine for years because it delivered good results. Google became first because it delivered beter results, and generally still does. MS search got a bad reputation from stories about manipulating search results. And the "in house" engine has no past performance - who would trust that at all?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The experiment is confused. Are the evaluators supposed to do their own research on the products, or respond with their trusted search engine? If the former, they shouldn't care what the raw data is from. If the latter, then it's not just branding, since each company is different and the point of trusting a company is that you accept their results without scrutiny (at least, with less); after all, what's the purpose of using their services if you feel you have to verify everything yourself anyway?
"Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine."
I don't understand, did people see the identical results and rate them differently? Or did they show Group A the google results of one query and the MSN results of another, and Group B vise versa?
I'd rather see people search for several queries of their choosing from the same four engines and be delivered result pages free from branding and see which results they preferred. It'd be much more useful.
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Branding is about consumer trust. If they trust your company to do something consistently well, they will place a good deal of faith in that (hopefully without becoming fanboys). As a result, whenever a product buying decision comes up, they are more likely to select the branded product.
A short introduction to branding
Branding can also work for open source. When people come to trust a "product," or piece of software like FireFox, they will keep using it until given a reason to do otherwise.
technical writing / development
If I was told a tidbit of medical advice came from Dr. Dean Edell I'd have weighted that higher than if I'd been told it came from Dr. Laura. This would be based on having heard each of them dispense advice in the past.
Now if they asked people who had never used a search engine and they rated them based on the name, then I'd call it "branding". But if the people polled had past experience with one or more of the search engines, that direct experience is liable to have a much greater influence than name recognition only.
Isn't there a difference between branding and reputation?
Surely the fact that people's preconceptions color their perceptions has been known for more than a year, and doesn't require looking directly into brains...?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"even on the Internet it's all about branding" The internet seems to have something in common with the outside world? How surprising.
Lies, all lies.
People use logic for decisions, NOT emotions. Geez everyone knows that
Seriously though, branding may seem a bit shallow and unscrupulous, but it certainly taps into how the brain works. We associate and generalize. Google good and MS bad, that type of thing. Then you throw in colors, images of happy people, etc, and you get a positive reaction. It may not be enough to surpress logical thinking, but these associations are powerful.
And most importantly, you taint the results by showing each person all four!
"Do you like Result 1?"
"Sure"
"Do you like Result 2?"
(thinking) "That looks familiar" (said) "I guess."
"Do you like Result 3?"
(thinking) "Okay, now that has to be the same thing" (said) "I guess so, sure."
"Do you like Result 4?"
(thinking) "wtf?" (said) "Whatever."
Especially if you are measuring not by written or oral results, but by "brainwaves". Of course there's going to be different activity in the brain. The brain is seeing patterns and getting confused. Is that skew trust, or taint?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
like dave said, it shows the results from the three big search engines, side by side... altho keep in mind it was a 48 hour side project of mine just, and the level of bugginess can very... windows live search for example has an ugly tendency to just not work at all with a lot of queries... :P... i've been meaning to take a serious stab at the project shortly tho when i get some free time :)
From the research paper :
"We recruited 32 participants from a major US university.
The age range was 18 to 25 years. There were 8 females and 24 males."
Hmmmmm...
32 test subjects hardly makes for statistically significant results.
Is this a representative cross section of all people using search engines?
These facts alone make the whole study almost meaningless, aside from issues of presentation
of the search results and trusting of familiar brands etc..
4 identical sets of results presented, but people say Google's results look more trustworthy, even when the only change is placing the Google brand at the top. More evidence toward what I've been telling the fanboys - Google's strength is its marketing, just as Microsoft.
BTW I highly recommend people switch to another search engine for a week. It's so nice to have 20 Wikipedia clones no longer appear as the top results for every topic - all to be immediately ignored as there are no controlling editors whose reputation allows me to judge whether a site is to be taken seriously, with a pinch of salt or ignored entirely. I also get to read pages that are relevant rather than popular - I'd almost forgotten that the Internet was about autonomous peers, not dominance by the few, and Google's very page ranking algorithm undermines this.
It's branding. I'd bet money that if this same test were run with people who've never used the Web before, that you'd get the exact same results, if the sample sizes were large enough.
I don't respond to AC's.
Hey, wait a second... im getting confused. If they wanted to see what brand people trust the most can they just look at usage logs (google being used more than other search engines). To me a more interesting experiment would be to do this all without showing and the logos to see what engine gives back the most useful results. I don't understand why they did the experiment....
present anyone with four different options: a 'free' copy of Lunix, and a pirated copy of either Windows or OS X.
10 out of 10 people will choose the pirated copy of Windows, because even unsupported Windows is viewed as vastly superior to the alternatives.
I remember when google first came out. Yahoo, msn, altavista, hotbot and several other sites were stronger brands than google. Google's search page was clean and wasn't cluttered with tons of stuff. It returned lots of results and it had the least amount of spam compared to the others. Nobody knew what google was but once I found it I started telling people about it.
I would say the factors for internet site success are: results, interface & word of mouth.
The tricky part about the internet is that if any of those three things change or is bested by another competitor, the flow of traffic will change.
Internet customers are not loyal to brands. They go with the flow. If all of a sudden google became obsessively cluttered or slow response or cluttered with spam, then we'd be ready for something else. And which ever service seemed to step up to the plate then the flow would change to the new place. But since we're all comfortable with 'google' right now, if there's a competitor that is offering a similar service, we have no reason to move the flow of traffic. But if google started being annoying, there are NO loyalties.
Slashdot only puts the Google and Yahoo! icons by the summary, proving... oh I give up.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
This is very interesting. I too would generally rank Google and Yahoo as my top search engines in terms of "quality.
:-)
A few months ago, though, I became aware of Yahoo's "paid inclusion" program. Basically you pay Yahoo money, and your company is more likely to show up in the "organic" results area of the search. Note i'm not talking about the sponsored results at the top of the page or the ones on the right side, the "paid inclusion" results are indistinguishable from normal search results. Apparently this is a well known feature in the industry but personally i was surprised to find out about it.
Technically, the ranking algorithm doesn't weigh these sites higher. PI just assures that your site is crawled often and that it is "crawled" according to the page definition feed that you provide.
here's a link to the program:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/ssp.php
I ran into this whole concept because i was surprised that the company i work for came up at the top of certain searches even though we have a lot of competitors. Even though we ARE better and more popular than many of our competitors, i was still surprised that we were at the top on some pretty specific terms. It showed a keener understanding of our site than i would have expected a crawler to have. At first i was really psyched about Yahoo's technology, but then i found out that we use paid inclusion.
I'm still undecided how i feel about this program. In my mind the main results are supposed to be purely based on site content/popularity , unlike the sponsored links. When you get an advantage by paying for access to their crawler... that's no longer the case. On the other hand, this isn't THAT different from other SEO techniques which are by definition mechanical ways that you can improve your standing. Only difference is that yahoo is directly involved in it.
I just thought of an example. I've been a huge fan of google and google maps for quite some time. I absolutely hate microsoft. Somebody showed me the cool 'birds eye view' on http://maps.live.com/ (firefox or IE required, safari doesn't work) ... it blew me away. I now use this to look around quite a bit. Google tried to combat with the 360 view thing. Honestly, that 360 view thing is completely worthless. Doesn't pull off the 'birds eye view' even close.
When the term 'googling' is used in place of 'searching' for the average PC user, I'de say that they have some market penetration.
Till you fuck up the product.
Deleted
It's reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt to honest companies and not to dishonest ones.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't have ACM membership for various reasons.
Anyone can send me the article or tell me how to get a copy?
The overall results of this study are that performance and reputation trump marketing money. M$ spends close to a billion dollars a month on advertising, dwarfing the combined spending of the rest, but people clearly think their stuff is second rate. This is how a the market should work and it's encouraging. People are not nearly as dumb as M$ thinks they are.
Reputation is a legitimate decision factor in information services. It's right for people to think M$'s search engine is goofey when M$ is such a dishonest company, their results have been poor in the past and they admit to selling placement. It's also right for people to have a neutral or favorable view of Google and Yahoo given the performance record of both companies in search. The neat thing about search is that things that don't look like useful results often are, at least when you use a good engine.
There were a few problems of sample size. The group size is to small and the responses were too poor to mean much. Only 36% of the results were judged relevant, which means the results from all the engines were poor. A larger study may show a real relationship between performance and trust that goes beyond marketing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
crap conclusion.
I hate this type of research. It's pointless infinite recursion. It's anthropology with numbers, but at least real anthropologists are willing to accept that their field is purely subjective.
define: human
see human.
Yeah, I hear ya. In China (and pretty much the rest of the world) the exact same scenario plays out every day.
Lunix is freely available, but everyone would rather pirate Windows. Contrary to BS from "the community", nobody is forcing these people to choose Windows: they are exercising their free will. Truth be told, people simply prefer to stick with Windows. It IS the best operating system ever created, after all.
Isn't there a difference between branding and reputation?
Yes. Branding is something you buy with a billion dollars a month in advertising, like M$ does. Reputation is something you build with a quality product, like everyone else does. People can tell the difference.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They trust their emotional response rather than inspect the evidence.
And, oh boy!, and election year coming up. I'm certain we'll select the best candidates for the job regardless of their appearance or celebrity.
Please stop voting. Or voicing opinions.
Google good and MS bad, that type of thing. Then you throw in colors, images of happy people, etc, and you get a positive reaction. It may not be enough to surpress logical thinking, but these associations are powerful.
So isn't it encouraging that people are able to see through the butterflies, "reach your potential" and other obvious bullshit that M$ spends a billion dollars a month on? If the results were really all about marketing M$ would have dominated the results as much as they do advertising. Yahoo's presence may be do to them spending a little more than Google, but the bottom line is performance. Advertising dollars saturate at a rather low level of trust. When your performance sucks bad enough, the advertising can be counter productive - another in your face annoyance you would rather have left at work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They said the trial subjects were only shown the test results, but they could have easily picked out Google and Yahoo anyway. They're the one's not mentioning the Tianamen Square Killings.
Hint for aspiring web search companies: The Wayback Machine is not your "Cache"
This is also how I interpreted the article. It doesn't seem like a good way to set up the experiment. Wouldn't anyone who actually used the search engines (the people that branding would mean something to) realize that the format of the search results didn't match what they normally see from that search engine? Or did the experimenters choose a neutral format that none of the search engines use, including the logos only as an identification of which search engine the results supposedly came from?
http://www.gahooyoogle.com/
I like the Google brand, but I can't seem to get over the ugliness of the logo. Yahoo, on the other hand, has an appealing and very identifiable logo, but I can't stand using the search engine/directory/whatever the heck it is.
I wonder, how much does the asthetics of the logo affect the brand strength? Any thoughts?
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Now after all the evil they have done.
I promise you people: There will be a day when Google will show its true face. Maybe not under the name Google but the day WILL COME.
No control, no science.
an amazing AC troll blurt:
I can hardly get through a TV program without having to watch one of MS "switcher" adds trying to convince people to drop Google search in favor of live search. Oh wait, that was in your reality, what was I thinking.
That's called projection. You consider your own circumstances universal and project your reasoning onto others. The results are wrong because the circumstances are different. There are no TV ads in my reality, so what you were thinking was wrong.
It was also stupid because you could just go look up M$, Yahoo and Google's advertising budget. M$ is the least transparent of the bunch, but their quarterly reports back up the billion dollars a month figure. I doubt Yahoo, Google, Apple, Sun and IBM spend as much as a group.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here's a link to the original article at the author's site that unlike the ACM digital library version is not locked up behind a subscription requirement: The Effect of Brand Awareness on the Evaluation of Search Engine Results [PDF]
Here's a more understandable summary that in TFA: They got Google search results on four e-commerce topics, stripped identifying HTML, and created 16 fake results pages with branded header and footers for four search engines The query results for a topic had identical content and presentation. They presented each of 32 test subjects four results pages, one for each topic. Which of the four brands each was shown and in what order the topics were presented were randomized. Subjects looked at each result one at a time. They were asked to evaluate the results, following links as they chose to and commenting out loud. Note that all results sections were identical is both content and format, with only the branded page header and footers being different.
The authors claim that Yahoo got the highest ratings (averaged over all four topic queries), 15.3% more than the overall average, compared to Google's 0.7% over average. But their table and graphs show results all over the map. Google scored 52.2% over average on the home improvement query. MSN had the highest score on the camping mexico query, Yahoo was highest on techno music, and the made up unknown search engine got the highest score on the laser removal query. That says to me that when you have four search engines and four queries to mix together in random order you need a lot more than 32 subjects to get statistically meaningful results. The paper contains no analysis of statistical significance of the results.
I remember when Yahoo was using Google results in their search. Then they broke off that agreement and started using their own search engine. I believe MSN was also using Google results, or maybe they were using Yahoo at the time that Yahoo was using Google. They basically licensed the results for their own branding.
;-) search for some of the info.
Here is the first result in a Google
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/32890.html
If I remember correctly, I started using Google full time shortly before or after Yahoo dropped them. I had been using Yahoo for my search engine prior to that, which had actually been Google for awhile.
I would be more like to think that it proves that on the internet, any two-bit study of a few dozen people is given significance it doesn't deserve.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Tsk. If only they had hosted with Google instead of whatever inferior brand they're using, they wouldn't have been slashdotted!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
The program is just to gt your site crawled quickly rather than to wait for them to find you. It does not affect the search results.t mlh p?o=INVALID&b=0
The results are still based on relevance.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ssb/smx-02.h
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/ssp_hiw.p
statistics say what we do, therefore we do what statistics say because "the majority has to be right, no?".
What this "study" proves, is that there are no alternatives and many people don't know and use that because there isn't anything else.
And it's obvious that Yahoo was the better one, just look at the results. Also MSN live never returns any hits? Something is wrong with your page? Beautiful and clean design, but is it really ok to take that background image? (It's from Vista isn't it?)
Do a search for .NET Framework using MSN Live search then with Google. Ironically enough Google finds the download first result, Live Search doesn't even have the .NET Framework on the first page. Pretty useless results searching for Microsoft's own product using their own product...