Users Love Microsoft, Yahoo Search -- When It's Branded With A Google Logo | Hacker News Reader

Users Love Microsoft, Yahoo Search -- When It's Branded With A Google Logo

businessinsider.com

48 pointslukas33 comments

This effect has actually been observed for quite awhile. For some inexplicable reason, people associate Google with integrity and correctness. We've observed people get objectively better results from non-google sources and then say Google's was better. When asked why, they basically special plead the case for Google (e.g., "This isn't what I meant to search for but it's very interesting." is evidently a real excuse offered).

It's a very weird effect. Ignoring everything else, Google certainly wins at cultivating brand loyalty. They're up there with Apple's brand loyalty in that respect.

Every few months, when MS or Yahoo or Ask claim to have improved their results, or some little guy claims to have better (or more useful) results than Google, I actually go try them out. Google consistently has more-relevant results, closer to the top than anyone else I've tried. Their new "SearchWiki" lets me fix the dozen or so cases where Google doesn't have the exact result I was looking for.

Do you scientifically analyze the results? Do you ever try and remove your internal bias? Confirmation bias is a very strong effect in search engine result evaluations.

I do this: When Google fails me, I try the other search engines. So far, they fail me too.

Is this scientific? No. It is at least more objective, though. And I'm not trying for scientific rigor, just "does it do the task?" It's totally fair, too; that's how Google picked me up in the first place, and anyone else who meets that bar will get my business.

>I do this: When Google fails me, I try the other search engines. So far, they fail me too.

There's a case you're missing - that Google doesn't outright fail, but its performance is inferior to Yahoo's or Microsoft's. For example, Google may have the page you're looking for at the bottom of the first page of results (in which case you'd probably be satisfied and not try another search engine), but Yahoo or Microsoft might list it as the first result, which would be superior performance.

It's just a search engine. It's not science.

That's not how anyone producing a search engine treats it. Data and feedback from users is rigorously analyzed in a statically consistent way that is as scientific as we can afford to make it.

Go do some mechanical turking for us, please. :)

It's information science.

When you're analyzing billions and billions of results and can produce a lot of data and can draw verifiable conclusions based on that data, I think it's safe to call it a science.

A search engine meant for use by billions of people is not a trivial thing.

There might also be another effect. Both Microsoft's search (under the MSN name) and Yahoo's existed before Google's. Google came along and really beat all the search engines that exited in terms of result quality. Microsoft and Yahoo have since upgraded their algorithms and gotten a lot better. However, people still associate the two as being the poor engines compared to Google's that they used to be. People's subjective evaluation of quality isn't just based on current results, but experiences they've had which might no longer apply due to changes in the product. There's no reason to include Yahoo search capabilities from 6 years ago in one's evaluation of Yahoo's results, but that's how people's minds operate.

I think that's why Microsoft desperately wants to rebrand their engine (over and over) so that people will think it's something new that they should evaluate for the first time rather than the pre-Google product that they found inferior to Google.

Yahoo first search engine was google embedded into yahoo. Before that, yahoo was just a searchable directory of websites. Later yahoo switched to their own search engine ouverture.

I'm pretty sure that was AltaVista, not Google.

Skrenta talks about this, "Brand Perception Gap": http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...

It's like with Coke. People prefer Pepsi-flavored brown carbonated sugar liquid to Coke-flavored brown carbonated sugar liquid, but Coke to Pepsi.

In the article they make it clear it's more than just the logo. They also use Google's page layout. That could help too. The colors are not the greatest, but it's quite clear.

There has to be something said for this. There is barely any noise on Google's pages and pretty much everyone has used Google for the past few years. That means that everyone is used to a search engine with very little noise. Yahoo, MS, and Ask don't exactly have "flashy" search pages but just glancing at their pages, you can see more distractions. I think this just amplifies the thought that Google is better.

Going to another search engine just feels weird.

Both Yahoo and MSN have noise-free interfaces you can use. See http://search.yahoo.com/ and http://search.live.com/.

Noise is also what you are not used to seeing. Yahoo!'s loho & drop down boxes & hints seem a lot more noisy.

I think part of it is because they are. But part of it is because unfamiliar is noisier then familiar.

'Bing' is actually an OK name -- it works as a verb, and you can easily imagine a positive "bing! you've found it!" ringing sound.

But is it still 'Live.com' search under a different name? Because they're not yet doing simple things that would make it easier for me to switch:

[3 liters in ounces] -- Google shows the answer, Live.com just miscellaneous results without the answer

[ambidesterous] -- Google shows correction, useful results and typo results; Live.com only random typo results

[ambidextrous] -- Google includes a distinguished dictionary 'definition' link at a predictable place in the header; Live.com only provides that mixed with other results and suggestions

[define:ambidextrous] -- Google provides a special list definitions culled from various sources; Live.com just normal results. (I use the 'define:' operator often.)

Why aren't MS and Yahoo at least aping these little easy-to-do things so that a switch is as painless as possible?

Until they do, I have the impression they're not even trying, because no product manager has created a list on a whiteboard of every way Google is better and said: "give us rough parity in every single one of these". (That's no way for a tiny startup to differentiate itself, but while trying to chisel off market share in this mature market, Yahoo and MS have the budget and need to do this.)

"Bing" is an okay name, but Google's starting to become a genericized trademark. It'll never legally become one but once your brand has reached genericized trademark status you have a lot of brand power. And that brand power is even more powerful online. It's one thing if you have a store shelf where Kleenex and generic kleenex are right next to each other. It's different if you're sitting at a computer thinking, "what site am I going to use to google for facial tissues?".

There's a marketing concept--I've forgotten what it's called--where people will think of a small number of brands for a given category. If a brand gets in your brain this way it's viable. That's why we see so many silly commercials that just say things like "Nike" with some sort of vaguely inspiring imagery, or irrelevant things like polar bears advertising Coca-Cola. It's not a matter of actually convincing anyone to buy the product, it's just to get their attention and get the brand name in their working memory, so the next time they think "I need to get new sneakers" or "I want a fizzy drink", their brain will enumerate the possible brands and something constantly shoved into their mental attentions like Coke will come up instead of RC Cola, even though they're next to each other on the same shelf.

With search engines, Google is in the enviable position of being the only search engine that comes to mind. No one thinks anymore, "I need to go to a website that will help me find fizzy drinks on the internet. Which sites do that? Ask Jeeves? Google? Windows Live Search?". They just think, "I'm gonna google me some fizzy drinks".

This reminds me of Evite. It's one of the websites geeks like to reinvent, but it's such just an uphill climb.

So on my main computer I've actually switched to Yahoo.

I've found about the same quality of searches most of the time but occasionally it just fails to give me what I want and I fall back to Google. For general purposes I would say that yahoo might even be slightly better. It seems to give me a bit less junk in my top 10 results.

Even with Yahoo's new interface it still seems messy relative to google.

Google results are terrible for me. The same queries that used to work in 2001 no longer work. The only reason I don't switch is because of the layout.

Really? Which search engine works for you, then?

None actually.

I agree. It seems that the problem is that they're trying to be too smart, and their heuristics are "fuzzing up" the search results.

If I'm searching for X, I generally want to search for X, and not things that may be vaguely related. I can't cull out unwanted results as easily by tweaking the keywords, I find.

Agreed. The quality of google search results has continued to noticeably decline over the last few years.

If true, this strengthens the case that Google's monopoly is dangerous. The defence of Google's market dominance has always been that users are not locked in to Google and would switch the moment something better arrived. If Google have built a brand loyalty that transcends that then they would be virtually impossible to challenge.

Just because you can't compete with them it doesn't make them bad guys. When google came into the market it didn't go to the government to say, hey Micrsofot is too big and that msn search engine is too good, if only you guys could disadvantage our competition!

True. I'm not passing judgement or using subjective terms like "bad guys", I'm just saying that the OP highlights what a robust monopoly Google has and that the counter arguments that some have offered are wrong.

They should save those $100M, Bing will be another failure.

hate to say it but bing does have that nice noun usage that google does, bing it, let me bing that for you

live search and msn never enjoyed that

Just hype up your own search startup and they might spend some of that $100m on you!

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