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."

Comments

I COMPLETELY disagree

[ryanw]

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.

Re:I COMPLETELY disagree

[whoever57]

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.

I heard about Google long before I used it. I stayed with AltaVista because I had learned their search syntax, so I knew how to do very targetted searches. What killed AltaVista for me was they somehow let their spidering get very out of date, and eventually, AltaVista just returned pages of broken links. Probably somewhere, some PHB, decided that money could be saved if they did less of this pesky "spidering the Internet" stuff which seemed unrelated to delivering adverts.

yahoo paid inclusion

[rta]

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.

Study Disproves Marketing, Proves Reputaion.

[twitter]

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.