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."
obvious (Score:5, Funny)
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Only time will tell.
Re:obvious (Score:5, Funny)
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Branding, or reputation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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But Yahoo did better in the survey than Google. I think it's a combination of the two; brand reputation, especially in something as obvious as search results, is often influenced by performance.
Branding. (Score:1)
Branding only works (Score:2)
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Reputation Counts. (Score:2)
It's reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt to honest companies and not to dishonest ones.
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No more!
Overture powered Yahoo! has surpassed it.
I can say it because I have seen my blog featuring on Google's first page for search queries that were mostly irrelevant to my content.
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Confused experiment (Score:1)
Control? (Score:2)
I don't understand, did people see the identical results and rate them differently? Or did they show Group A the google results of one query and the MSN results of another, and Group B vise versa?
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It sounds like they gave a number of people the same page with different logos. It doesn't sound to me like they gave the same people the same page with different logos. So they asked people to rate the reliability of the results, and people who were given the Google logo rated the same results better than people who were given a no-name logo.
I guess. That was my reading.
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They showed the same results to different people and asked them to rate the quality of the results. The result samples with Google and Yahoo! logos scored better than MSN.
Presentation / formatting matters (Score:2)
It was the same results with the same layout, only the logo at the top changed.
This is also how I interpreted the article. It doesn't seem like a good way to set up the experiment. Wouldn't anyone who actually used the search engines (the people that branding would mean something to) realize that the format of the search results didn't match what they normally see from that search engine? Or did the experimenters choose a neutral format that none of the search engines use, including the logos only as an identification of which search engine the results supposedly came from?
Study Disproves Marketing, Proves Reputaion. (Score:5, Interesting)
The overall results of this study are that performance and reputation trump marketing money. M$ spends close to a billion dollars a month on advertising, dwarfing the combined spending of the rest, but people clearly think their stuff is second rate. This is how a the market should work and it's encouraging. People are not nearly as dumb as M$ thinks they are.
Reputation is a legitimate decision factor in information services. It's right for people to think M$'s search engine is goofey when M$ is such a dishonest company, their results have been poor in the past and they admit to selling placement. It's also right for people to have a neutral or favorable view of Google and Yahoo given the performance record of both companies in search. The neat thing about search is that things that don't look like useful results often are, at least when you use a good engine.
There were a few problems of sample size. The group size is to small and the responses were too poor to mean much. Only 36% of the results were judged relevant, which means the results from all the engines were poor. A larger study may show a real relationship between performance and trust that goes beyond marketing.
I'd rather see (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'd rather see (Score:5, Insightful)
They wanted to study what affect branding had on user perceptions - a completely different thing, also normal and studied slightly fewer times.
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altho, your suggestion does tickle my geek b
I tried your page (Score:2)
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i'm glad you like the design tho (even tho its q
Re:I'd rather see (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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A better follow-up study would be to present users with four sets of results, two of which are clearly inferior by any objective measure*, label the inferior results with "Google" and "Yahoo" and see if the users still pick "Google" and/or "Yahoo" as being the best.
* "clearly inferior by any objective measure" doesn't mean that the results are horrible, just clearly inferior. (Although one could also do a study where the results are indeed horrible, lable the horrible with "Google" and see what the
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.
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Realistically, however, a brand's ability to produce high-quality results is not essential to the maintenance or a brand's power in the marketplace. Consumers routinely prove that trustworthy results are nowhere near as important as simple familia
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Was it the "brand" or past experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Branding and Reputation. (Score:1, Troll)
Isn't there a difference between branding and reputation?
Yes. Branding is something you buy with a billion dollars a month in advertising, like M$ does. Reputation is something you build with a quality product, like everyone else does. People can tell the difference.
Marketing Realities. (Score:1, Troll)
an amazing AC troll blurt:
I can hardly get through a TV program without having to watch one of MS "switcher" adds trying to convince people to drop Google search in favor of live search. Oh wait, that was in your reality, what was I thinking.
That's called projection. You consider your own circumstances universal and project your reasoning onto others. The results are wrong because the circumstances are different. There are no TV ads in my reality, so what you were thinking was wrong.
It was also stup
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The fact that Dr. Laura is not a medical doctor wouldn't even enter into it?
A little overkill? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...?
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Yeah, but common sense and looking at people's brains aren't the only two options. If you're drawing conclusions about behavior, studies (like this one) about behavior are more appropriate than seeing whether some neuron fires when you see a Coke can. It's been directly established for decades that perceptions are affected by prejudices.
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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.
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Are you talking about the brain researchers or the search engine study? If the latter, I don't understand how you concluded that from the article. If the former -- yes, I agree that that research is completely unrelated to what is being studied in the search engine experiment, which is why I was mystified by the author's ref
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Lies All Lies (Score:2)
People use logic for decisions, NOT emotions. Geez everyone knows that
Seriously though, branding may seem a bit shallow and unscrupulous, but it certainly taps into how the brain works. We associate and generalize. Google good and MS bad, that type of thing. Then you throw in colors, images of happy people, etc, and you get a positive reaction. It may not be enough to surpress logical thinking, but these associations are powerful.
Lies Seen Through. (Score:1, Troll)
Google good and MS bad, that type of thing. Then you throw in colors, images of happy people, etc, and you get a positive reaction. It may not be enough to surpress logical thinking, but these associations are powerful.
So isn't it encouraging that people are able to see through the butterflies, "reach your potential" and other obvious bullshit that M$ spends a billion dollars a month on? If the results were really all about marketing M$ would have dominated the results as much as they do advertising. Y
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Too small of a pool (Score:2)
And most importantly, you taint the results by showing each person all four!
"Do you like Result 1?"
"Sure"
"Do you like Result 2?"
(thinking) "That looks familiar" (said) "I guess."
"Do you like Result 3?"
(thinking) "Okay, now that has to be the same thing" (said
Wait A Second... (Score:1)
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I COMPLETELY disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
I would say the factors for internet site success are: results, interface & word of mouth.
The tricky part about the internet is that if any of those three things change or is bested by another competitor, the flow of traffic will change.
Internet customers are not loyal to brands. They go with the flow. If all of a sudden google became obsessively cluttered or slow response or cluttered with spam, then we'd be ready for something else. And which ever service seemed to step up to the plate then the flow would change to the new place. But since we're all comfortable with 'google' right now, if there's a competitor that is offering a similar service, we have no reason to move the flow of traffic. But if google started being annoying, there are NO loyalties.
Re:I COMPLETELY disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
EXAMPLE (Score:2)
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Somebody showed me the cool 'birds eye view' on http://maps.live.com/ [live.com] (firefox or IE required, safari doesn't work) ... it blew me away.
It is cool - although the interface has a few "microsoftian" quirks.
E.g: Why does one drag around the map under the field of vision? This strangely reverses controls. It'd feel much more natural to drag the field across the map the way a brid or a plane would fly around.
The same thing goes for the buttons that indicate the direction you're looking towards: The map doesn't change its orientation (rightfully so), it keeps North on top at all times. So why do the buttons on the compass interface wander around
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You have the competence to judge what is a good search result and what isn't. Most average Joes and Janes does not have that competence, and will - when unsure - go for the brands they can recognize.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
yahoo paid inclusion (Score:4, Interesting)
A few months ago, though, I became aware of Yahoo's "paid inclusion" program. Basically you pay Yahoo money, and your company is more likely to show up in the "organic" results area of the search. Note i'm not talking about the sponsored results at the top of the page or the ones on the right side, the "paid inclusion" results are indistinguishable from normal search results. Apparently this is a well known feature in the industry but personally i was surprised to find out about it.
Technically, the ranking algorithm doesn't weigh these sites higher. PI just assures that your site is crawled often and that it is "crawled" according to the page definition feed that you provide.
here's a link to the program:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/ssp.php [yahoo.com]
I ran into this whole concept because i was surprised that the company i work for came up at the top of certain searches even though we have a lot of competitors. Even though we ARE better and more popular than many of our competitors, i was still surprised that we were at the top on some pretty specific terms. It showed a keener understanding of our site than i would have expected a crawler to have. At first i was really psyched about Yahoo's technology, but then i found out that we use paid inclusion.
I'm still undecided how i feel about this program. In my mind the main results are supposed to be purely based on site content/popularity , unlike the sponsored links. When you get an advantage by paying for access to their crawler... that's no longer the case. On the other hand, this isn't THAT different from other SEO techniques which are by definition mechanical ways that you can improve your standing. Only difference is that yahoo is directly involved in it.
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The thought that search results could beco
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Here's a news story from 1999 about it when it began:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=21 67091 [searchenginewatch.com]
Well (Score:2)
nice experiment (Score:2)
I hate this type of research. It's pointless infinite recursion. It's anthropology with numbers, but at least real anthropologists are willing to accept that their field is purely subjective.
define: human
see human.
Not a valid double blind test (Score:2)
Hint for aspiring web search companies: The Wayback Machine is not your "Cache"
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Beat This! (Score:1, Informative)
Brand and logo (Score:2)
I wonder, how much does the asthetics of the logo affect the brand strength? Any thoughts?
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.
32 test subjects, this is a joke (Score:2)
I would be more like to think that it proves that on the internet, any two-bit study of a few dozen people is given significance it doesn't deserve.
Slashdotted (Score:1)
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