People Trust Yahoo! and Google For the Brands

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."

Branding, or reputation?

[R2.0]

One could easily give credit to the results of past performance. Yahoo was the #1 search engine for years because it delivered good results. Google became first because it delivered beter results, and generally still does. MS search got a bad reputation from stories about manipulating search results. And the "in house" engine has no past performance - who would trust that at all?

I'd rather see

[Kamokazi]

I'd rather see people search for several queries of their choosing from the same four engines and be delivered result pages free from branding and see which results they preferred. It'd be much more useful.

Was it the "brand" or past experience.

[MDMurphy]

If I was told a tidbit of medical advice came from Dr. Dean Edell I'd have weighted that higher than if I'd been told it came from Dr. Laura. This would be based on having heard each of them dispense advice in the past.

Now if they asked people who had never used a search engine and they rated them based on the name, then I'd call it "branding". But if the people polled had past experience with one or more of the search engines, that direct experience is liable to have a much greater influence than name recognition only.

Isn't there a difference between branding and reputation?

A little overkill?

[Otter]

This is in line with the finding last year by German researchers who showed using MRI scans that well-known brands activate positive emotional responses in people's brains.

Surely the fact that people's preconceptions color their perceptions has been known for more than a year, and doesn't require looking directly into brains...?

Re:I'd rather see

[sholden]

That'd just be a study to see which search engine gives the best results, which is a pretty normal boring done a million times thing.

They wanted to study what affect branding had on user perceptions - a completely different thing, also normal and studied slightly fewer times.

Re:I'd rather see

[colmore]

Useful to whom?

If the intended audience of the study are search engine power users who need to know about slight differences in algorithmic performance, then yes, your study would be more "useful."

However if the intended audience is the marketing and research divisions of major search engine players, then this study goes a lot farther in saying what gets market results than yours would. It answers the question: "do we spend $1 million improving our tech or do we spend it selling our brand?"

Of course it's hardly a secret that customer satisfaction has very little to do with the freely made up mind of the customer. Its why car companies go to such lengths to provide little perks to purchasers and leasers of new cars. A few tens of thousands of miles of free oil changes tends to make the average customer a lot happier with their car than actually buying a really good car does. What makes the average geek happy with one gadget he buys, uses for a week and then leaves in the drawer, and unhappy with another? Even with smart consumers its very rarely a hard honest brass tacks look at features, performance, and price.

Re:Branding, or reputation?

[benjamin264]

When Yahoo was number one, they were using Google for search results. They lost that position (in part) because they started selling result positioning, making them far less accurate. Throw in a clunky interface and Google starts looking even better...

Re:A little overkill?

[Dhalka226]

Surely the fact that people's preconceptions color their perceptions has been known for more than a year

Luckily that isn't what they showed.

There's a difference between "Google is a good company, I'm going to use them for my search" and "mmmmm, Gooooogle."

Yes, of course we knew that brands matter in decisions. What they showed was it triggers emotional reaction. Not logical decisions. Not recall of past experience with a brand. Emotions.

Not only would I say that's an interesting notion even today, I'd say it's one that needs to be studied even more.