Google's search secret: It gets rid of you

Nielsen yesterday released a study it conducted on the popularity of the top 10 search engines for July. As expected, Google sat atop the list, commanding more than 60 percent of the market after enjoying 16 percent year-over-year growth. Trailing behind, Yahoo and Microsoft captured 17.4 percent and 11.9 percent of the market, respectively. More importantly, both companies lost ground to Google--Yahoo witnessed an 11 percent decline, while Microsoft suffered through a 10 percent decline.

And although countless tech pundits will chime in and discuss exactly why Google has been able to run roughshod over its competition, few will point out one basic fact that is too often overlooked: Google search is designed to get rid of you as quickly as possible.

Surely, some will attribute Google's success to its better search results or Yahoo's management troubles or Microsoft's poor offering, but it goes far beyond that. Search isn't simply about relevant results or the competition. Instead, search is all about getting you to your destination as quickly as possible.

And so far, it's quite apparent that only Google understands that basic premise.

Search engines are nothing more than middlemen that are designed to get your thought to your destination. In other words, if you're looking for places to live in Naples, Fla., you get to Google, ask it for places to live in Naples, and hope that one of the results will give you what you want. But if you don't, you're forced to keep searching until you find what you're looking for. And as anyone who queries search engines on a daily basis knows, nothing is more frustrating.

But Google, unlike Yahoo and Microsoft, has made it a key point in its business model to ensure that you get off the Google search result pages as soon as possible. Its competitors, on the other hand, fail to fully understand that premise.

A quick jaunt to Yahoo's search page tells you everything you need to know about the company's ideas about search: it wants you to stay on Yahoo's pages and look around. But Google doesn't feel that way. It's of the opinion that the less time you spend using Google search results, the more often you'll go back instead of using a competitor's service.

Think about that for a second. Doesn't that run directly against everything we know about the Web? Practically every site is designed to keep you there. How many times have you tried to click links in a blog post, only to find that it links you back to another section of the same site? It happens all the time.

Basically, more Web sites try to keep you from going elsewhere for fear that you will never come back. But Google doesn't worry about that.

Google wants you to leave and feels like it has done its job when you do. Now, part of that equation revolves around the quality of search results and the service's usability, but we can't downplay the fact that letting you go is a key to the company's success.

Google was the first company to embrace the idea that letting users go can actually turn into a business model. And so far, it's really the only company that still believes it. But maybe site owners can learn something from Google. Instead of worrying about where you go and making sure you don't stray too far, site owners need to be willing to let you go and be confident enough to stand on the quality of their content to keep you coming back.

It may sound counterintuitive, but if Google has shown us anything, getting rid of you in the search space works extremely well.

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[cporpheus]

I think it might have started that way, but I think Google is growing from its own momentum at this point. Its a reasonably good search engine and it occupies nearly all of the public's mindshare. Any search engine that wants to compete with Google has to be 10 times better, easier and (as stated in the article) faster towards your destination than Google.

[GreginChicagoland]

I'd be the first to admit, I've not been a big fan of some of your posts, but I think this was an excellent piece and you were dead-on. I think this takes a nice look from a different angle on search. Nice job.

[co_z]

The reason Google is ok with you leaving their site is that in all likelihood they are also on the site you click through to, in the form of google analytics, adwords, etc. In other words, they have built a significant part of their revenue model on omnipresence - the fact that wherever you go, Google is still making money off of you. They got there by making smart investments and building better tools for sites to monetize their content. Yahoo and MSFT would love to have that, but Yahoo ceded that ground a long time ago and MSFT has never had a toolset it could really push onto a network of affiliated sites. This isn't necessarily a lesson you can 'learn' from - was just an excellent strategy that has crushed the competition.

[Penguinisto]

Actually, that makes perfect sense. Yahoo and Microsoft's offerings are bogged down with ads, enticements to go peruse other parts of their site (hence more ads get shown to you, etc).

Google is very simple, sweet, and quite simply, it works. That is worth more to me (and I suspect most folks) than any eye-candy or flashy 'feature'.

[Daniel_Tunkelang]

It's a nice theory, but I'm not actually convinced that it's true. Google, like Yahoo and Microsoft, has done a lot to try to keep you in its ecosystem (e.g., links to Gmail, News, and Reader from the Google.com page). And, in my experience, Google is more like to send you to another Google page than either Yahoo or Microsoft, e.g., through OneBox or secondary search).

There's no question that Google is crushing Yahoo and Microsoft. My sense is that this is what Cornell economist Robert Frank calls a winner-take-all market. The three major web search engines are almost identical, but Google delivers a slightly better experience. That small difference is enough to make Google the winner, much as a small difference in a baseball player's stats can mean millions of difference in his market value.

Moreover, the difference used to be larger, but Microsoft and Yahoo have learned the hard way that catching up isn't enough. Now they have to face Google's reputation and incumbency. As I blogged recently, parity or even incremental advantage isn't enough; a successful rival will have to identify and address clear consumer needs for which Google isn't good enough as a solution.

More details on my blog:
http://thenoisychannel.blogspot.com/2008/08/is-google-good-enough_05.html

[piccolbo]

Not only they direct people to their properties as Daniel and others observed, but they direct people to AdSense-running sites. At least, that's one possible explanation of why these sites are ranked higher in google than live.com. See http://piccolbo.blogspot.com/2008/08/google-returns-more-adsense-rich.html for a detailed analysis. So in that sense it is true they continue to make money even when you leave their properties.

[dragonbite]

You know the other reason for getting you off of the page? Each time your come back you hit another collection of advertisements.

If it takes you 3 clicks to get what you want then that is 3 pages worth of advertisements, instead of trying to get you to spend 5 minutes reading an article on a page that you get bored of and go elsewhere.

[auddess]

Actually, if you go to yahoo's *search* page, it's just as sparse as google's: http://search.yahoo.com/

[cwendauthi]

More characters than "google.com". That is why they fail. Minimalistic with the OPTION to add more is the way to go for a lot of web-savvy people.

[ozidigga]

Interesting enough. The fact that Google bases it's entire business model around search is also what makes it so efficient. Google's other services users have to in fact search for it - it's not advertised all over it's webpage. If you type in www.yahoo.com you get bombarded with a whole array of advertisment including search - and I can't even hit Microsoft livesearch by typing in www.livesearch.com - but rather www.live.com. Just the phrase 'Google it' pretty much says it all, anyone knows it's another term for 'Search for it'. Yahoo and Microsoft are too diverse in their business model to be able have the pleasure of such simplicity.

[cwendauthi]

"Yahoo and Microsoft are too diverse in their business model to be able have the pleasure of such simplicity."

I feel like that's the key difference. MS and Yahoo were designed to be one-stop homepages. That functionality came to google much later and is an option rather than the default. Google started off with a good, single-purpose product and then used that to build an empire of similarly SOLID enterprises.

We may all have used Hotmail and Yahoo's crappy email... I at least never liked either. Google is built around customer satisfaction, even if they're profiting hand over fist through customer participation.

[shrung_rung]

Google's speed is onlye the only neither the most important factor in it's success.

http://net-insider.blogspot.com

[87onarian]

HUNH?

[xb100]

This concept is known as good service as we see occasionally in the service industry. Starbucks practices this as well, I would say. Good observation.

[compudoc318]

charging what they do for coffee (a bean and water) is hardly good service...lol

[cwendauthi]

It's not what they do to the coffee, it's what they do FOR the customer. It's also the culture that they've built around themselves. A self-sustaining model based around decent products and good customer service. All of which leads to profit.

[TV James]

This is the point I cannot convince my wife of.

Well, that and the fact that Google returns better search results. She still swears Yahoo! does. Even after she can't find something, gives up, walks away and I flip over to Google, find the result and email it to her.

[hpew]

IMHO Google just overwhelms. You put in keywords and Google proceeds to throw the kitchen sink at you.

The order is not by relevance, but by TRAFFIC. So the most relevant site (the one you ACTUALLY want) will be hidden further down the list. Sometimes it may not show up at all, at least not on Google.

Somebody found his or her way to my own website, by using two key words in MS search. Out of curiosity I tried the same keywords on Google: The first five or six sites matched only ONE of the keywords, followed by my site (with both keywords matching.) This again was followed by about a gazillion pages (give or take a zillion) with irrelevant garbage.

MS search simply had my website listed first.

If you need to hit a fly, you can certainly use a bazooka. However, usually a swatter will do.

[cwendauthi]

If you're not finding something, you're probably not using the right key words. Going by traffic is a great way to get general information about a given topic.

[Chameleon81]

Another reason why Google is so successful is localization. Yahoo is "100 years" old still do not have Turkish site. ( 70 million people with 20% homes with internet rate -- low compared to developed nations but still makes 14 million people )

[betteguadalupe]

I use Goggle first before any other search engine, plus tell my friends to use it.