Comments on: Google's search secret: It gets rid of you

Don Reisinger believes the key to Google's success is getting you off its pages as soon as possible. But does it go beyond that?

[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.