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Our secret sauce

googleblog.blogspot.com

19 pointsblackswan14 comments

This article is completely missing the point of what makes Google successful. It might have been having a better product that helped them at first, but right now the single most important factor keeping people coming back to Google is: habit.

Everyone is used to going to Google to search. Heck, you often hear people use the word google instead of search. This habit is hard to break. Switching to the competitor is not just a few keystrokes away. It takes breaking the habit of reaching for Google whenever I need to search.

It takes more than a slightly better product for folks to break this kind of habit. It's the same reason why Google has trouble competing with established search engines in other countries, even if Google has better results.

When Google came out it was a LOT better than everyone else, so people switched. Now the competitors are barely catching up to Google, or at best making incremental advances over Google: not enough to get people to switch.

The article also failed to mention Branding (which is related to our habits). If you aren't using _Google_, you're using some other "crappy" search engine.

Google is a black swan. People keep trying to explain its success in ways Google founders never thought about. I remember that Google Story cited a branding expert saying something close to "These guys don't know what their brand stands for; they are just coders".

tell that to their billions

There's nothing wrong with being just coder, although they seem to be scientists too. To me their approach to data demonstrates that scientific method has become a viable way of doing business. The recent bestseller Super Crunchers seems to try to establish this as a trend:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=...

Thank you! I always say that they have one of the most profitable products in the history of the world. By definition, there aren't many "most profitable products in the history of the world", so trying to duplicate their product is a waste of time. So many things went perfectly, both in execution and timing (for instance, they could afford to hire everyone that got laid off after the bust).

altavista.digital.com was a reflexive habit two years before Google was. Now, there are kids who have never heard of it.

There's no doubt in my mind that if Google had failed to keep up with SEO spammers, someone else would have replaced them just like they replaced AltaVista. The value proposition would be simple: No more poring over search results to find the one non-spam page you were actually looking for buried on the fourth page.

sure. If google didn't manage to keep their results relevant then a competitor could provide a significant improvement and a good reason for folks to switch. Google however doesn't need to have the best product however, they just need to keep the gap between them and their competitors and their momentum will keep them ahead.

There's an article on this, which calls it "cognitive lock-in":

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Artic...

'Google has been searching the web for nearly 10 years, which is far longer than our major competitors.'

As far as I know Yahoo has been around for just as long as Google. Cool article though.

Side note: I think it's cool that both Google and Yahoo came out of projects started by Stanford students.

"Supply side economies of scale" - Google must enjoy extraordinarily low costs per hardware, given the sheer amounts they keep. Based on their volume, their discounts must be at least around 90%. I wouldn't call that a "reasonably small scale".

"Lock-in" / "Network effects" - I would argue that both come into play by the sheer fact that almost all web sites are being optimized towards the way Google's algorithms (are supposed to) work.

Once again Google plays down the significance of the PageRank patent. Is search amongst the giants really as similar as he says here? I know that Google has had to do a lot of tricks to avoid gaming of PageRank, but isn't PageRank still the core?

What's more significant is the theft of the Yahoo text ad model/patent, and the multi-billion $ payoff for its use. I don't know exactly how they pulled that off, but the patent's worth must be around $100 billion.

As a postscript, that patent came from Overture (which came from the Idealab incubator), which itself was a billion-dollar buyout. I wonder if a company will in turn buy its use off Google for even more?

Does external threats ("competition is just a click away") work as such a great motivator after the company's headcount passes 1000?

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