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August 16, 2005
Search Engine Loyalty
Search engines survive on money generated through page views. The more people you have using your engine, the more people you'll have clicking your ads - this translates into revenue.
It's pretty clear that search companies should try their hardest to get as many users as possible, and that's where captology comes in. After all, their job is to persuade us, the user, into using their service instead of their competitor's.
So, what are some ways that the big search engines try to get us to use their particular service? Well, Yahoo! is betting that size matters. Last week, Yahoo! announced that they were increasing their searchable index to 20 billion objects (19.2 billion of which are web pages). This created quite a stir in the search community, for good reason. 20 billion pages is a lot. More than double Google's published index.
Bigger is better, right? It worked for computers and digital cameras. However, in Yahoo!'s own blog entry, the author notes that "size is only one dimension of the quality of a search engine." Indeed, in a news article I read repeating Yahoo!'s announcement of their increase, the article was quick to mention that this increase in size did not necessarily mean that Yahoo!'s results would be better than Google's.
So much for size. What about the interface? Usability can be extremely important in software. Now that I think about it, Google and Yahoo! look pretty identical these days...
How about branding? There's no denying that Google is hot right now. Yahoo! has little trouble hiring smart people, though, so their brand is still fairly strong. And really, I don't think any number of news articles would cause me to switch search engines.
So, what's the point? There's more than meets the eye to persuading users to change something as seemingly easy as their search engine. I don't think one single factor will change someone's preferred engine, but a combination of factors might be enough to tip the scale one way or the other.
Posted by Gregory Cuellar at August 16, 2005 01:32 PM