People Trust Yahoo! and Google For the Brands 95
amigoro writes "Here's an interesting experiment: Copy Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries. Tell 32 test subjects who are going to evaluate the results that the results were from four different search engines: Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then see which ones they rate as the best. As it turns out Google and Yahoo! win hands down, proving that even on the Internet it's all about branding."
Consumer trust (Score:5, Informative)
Branding is about consumer trust. If they trust your company to do something consistently well, they will place a good deal of faith in that (hopefully without becoming fanboys). As a result, whenever a product buying decision comes up, they are more likely to select the branded product.
A short introduction to branding [slideshare.net]
Branding can also work for open source. When people come to trust a "product," or piece of software like FireFox, they will keep using it until given a reason to do otherwise.
Beat This! (Score:1, Informative)
The original research article (and why it's bogus) (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a more understandable summary that in TFA: They got Google search results on four e-commerce topics, stripped identifying HTML, and created 16 fake results pages with branded header and footers for four search engines The query results for a topic had identical content and presentation. They presented each of 32 test subjects four results pages, one for each topic. Which of the four brands each was shown and in what order the topics were presented were randomized. Subjects looked at each result one at a time. They were asked to evaluate the results, following links as they chose to and commenting out loud. Note that all results sections were identical is both content and format, with only the branded page header and footers being different.
The authors claim that Yahoo got the highest ratings (averaged over all four topic queries), 15.3% more than the overall average, compared to Google's 0.7% over average. But their table and graphs show results all over the map. Google scored 52.2% over average on the home improvement query. MSN had the highest score on the camping mexico query, Yahoo was highest on techno music, and the made up unknown search engine got the highest score on the laser removal query. That says to me that when you have four search engines and four queries to mix together in random order you need a lot more than 32 subjects to get statistically meaningful results. The paper contains no analysis of statistical significance of the results.