We’ve done three studies now on how people react with search engines, and one finding that has been consistent across all three studies still amazes me.

All other things being equal, Google dominates as the search engine of choice. In the latest survey, Google was picked as the favorite engine by a walloping 82.9 percent of respondents. Nobody else even came close. Yahoo! limped into second place with a scarce 7.5 percent of the vote.

So, why does Google dominate to this extent? Is it the best search engine? Well, it’s good, but arguably there are others at least as good. The brand has certainly become a household word, but Yahoo! was there first, and look how their market share has dropped.

Google’s success with users comes primarily from an unwavering respect for those users. Google has always put the user experience front and center, and this commitment to has bought them fierce loyalty.

Sometimes the Bottom Line Isn’t Always About Money

Search engines make money when people click on the sponsored listings. Except for some paid inclusion revenue, minimal compared to the paid placement streams, search engines make no money from organic listings.

Following that line of reasoning, it seems to make sense to encourage as many people to click on sponsored listings as possible. Every click puts more money in the bank account.

This line of reasoning has been used at most of the other engines. MSN, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves and others have all tried to maximize the amount of sponsored real estate on their results page. Ask Jeeves won’t usually show an organic listing without the user having to scroll.

The engines love to see more click-throughs on sponsored listings. The advertisers love it. So why not? Everybody wins, right?

Not the user. We go to search engines for organic results. Sure, we’ll click on a sponsored listing about 30 percent of the time if it appears relevant, but that’s not why we go to the search engine. We go for the unpaid listings. If we can’t find them on one engine, we’ll go to another where we can.

Tale of Two Engines

Google gets this. They have the lowest sponsored click-through rates of any of the major engines. While sponsored listings have been given prominent placement, the organic listings always have center stage. They’ve never tried to trick us with vague labeling of sponsored results or tried to push organic off the page by increasing the number of sponsored ads on top.

Short-term, that strategy would certainly boost Google’s revenues, but what would happen in the long term? Well, perhaps we have to look no further than Ask Jeeves. They’ve played games with their organic rankings, trying to boost their sponsored revenue. And if you look at click-through percentages as recorded in our surveys, it’s worked.

About half the click-throughs on Ask Jeeves occur on sponsored listings. Google only captures 23.3 percent click-through on sponsored ads. But 82.9 percent of our 1,500 respondents said they use Google and only o.6 percent said they use Ask Jeeves.

When you slice the pie that way, you’re going to end up with a lot more revenue, no matter what your click-through percentage is.

The User Giveth and the User Taketh Away

Online loyalty is a fickle thing. Google has never forgotten where it came from. It emerged from nowhere and gained leading market share because it focused on one thing: the user. Then, it found ways to create revenue from that model without jeopardizing the delicate balance between profit and the user experience.

Google has realized that user traffic is a privilege, and you can never lose sight of that fact. If you treat them right, you will be rewarded. Fail to do so, and you’ll end up with a very small slice of the pie.

First published Oct 27, 2004 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Google’s beta release of their desktop search tool was their shot across the bow of the USS Microsoft Search. Following hard on the heels of promising technology releases from Blinkx and Copernic, Google is staking their claim to the desktop search space.

And Microsoft seems to have been caught flat-footed, as they continue to push back the deadline for the release of Longhorn, which will integrate desktop search with the operating system. Many seem to think a search related announcement out of Redmond, Wash. is imminent.

So, if one looks at what’s come out of the major search engine labs lately, you’ll see a rush of new technologies centered on the ideas of desktop search, local search, indexing of rich media, and personalized search. It seems that everything we’ve been talking about in the past three years is suddenly coming on the market in one fell swoop.

This has prompted a number of analysts to start asking where search is going. I’ve been firmly seated on that particular bandwagon, adding my own prognostications to the many that are out there. But sometime last week, I slapped my forehead and pronounced myself an idiot (beating several others to the punch).

It really isn’t the release of technology that will dictate where search is going. It’s the public’s acceptance of that technology. And I’m not speaking about a few techno geeks huddled in the cool blue glow of a LCD flat screen. I’m talking about the masses.

Innovation Only Makes a Difference When It’s Accepted

There is a dilemma that is inherent in technical innovation. As the innovators, we tend to get caught up in the possibilities of technology and base our business decisions on it. But the fact is that the success of technology only takes place with widespread adoption by the general public.

In the high tech business, we tend to be surrounded with others like ourselves. We are the classic early adopters, looking for the latest technological gizmo. We tweak our computers and other various electronic gadgets, spend hours tracking down problems with drivers, and happily put up with bug after bug to gain an edge over the less technically savvy.

In our biz, we all tend to be members of this relatively small segment of the real world. Unfortunately, we sometimes make decisions that seem valid because everyone we talk to agrees with us. It’s not until the public flatly rejects our innovations that we realize it was never capable of going beyond the research lab.

So, if you ask me, or any of the others who have been writing about this, which of the emerging search innovations will make the difference in the industry, you might be asking the wrong person. I’m a geek. Go ask your Aunt Mildred, but be prepared to spend some time explaining what you’re talking about.

Public Adoption Can’t be Rushed…

As early adopters, we work on a radically different time line than the general public. We tend to leap into new technology before it’s fully tested. We move in a matter of weeks or months to try the latest new thing. The rest of the world takes years. So as we try out local search, desktop search, and personalized search, remember that the latest developments will probably take a long time to trickle down to the average Joe… unless you leave no options!

This opens up a rather interesting advantage for Microsoft in the search game. Because of their domination of so many parts of our interaction with our computers, they can force adoption of a new technology to an extent no one else can. Every other player, including Google, has to convince us that their technological innovations are worth using. Microsoft can leave us with no choice. So Google will continue to roll things out of their search lab, and we will eagerly install the latest beta.

Someday (probably soon) a major development will come out of Redmond about Microsoft Search. We “in the know” will rush to pronounce it a failure, or success, but the judgment isn’t really ours to make. It’s the millions of people who have no idea that Google now has a desktop search tool, or that Microsoft is integrating search into their operating system, that will ultimately make the difference. And they will only bestow that success when they’re good and ready.

The winner of search will be the one who is the shrewdest about controlling that timeline.

First published in Mediapost’s Search Insider – September 28, 2004

Search engines are knocking on the door of the future. The 800-pound gorillas of search and brash new upstarts like Blinkx and Gurunet are working to find a way to make search more intuitive, ubiquitous, and intelligent.

Someday, search will be interwoven with everything we do and consequentially, we won’t lift a finger. Links to the sites we’re looking for will suddenly appear in a discrete search pane or a pop-up window. It’s inevitable.

Or is it? Is this what we as search users want? Do we want to hand control over to an omniscient, eerily cheerful search assistant that knows far too much about our user patterns and personal tastes?

Friendly Search Engine Seeking Single Middle Aged Woman

The personalization of search has been bandied about as the next big step forward in the industry. We need (so we are told) search engines that get to know us and what we like. Blinkx is already heading down this road, and Microsoft has a team of engineers busy in their Cambridge, England lab working on making their brand of search more attuned to the user and the job currently at hand. If you look at the type of people Google hires, you’ll find the following interest areas featured prominently: profiling, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

But to make these search enhancements work to their full potential, we crawl onto the very slippery slope of user profiling. As the search engine observes us, it can create a profile of our interests, usage patterns, and other very personal information. It can then use this information to make its search results more relevant to the individual user.

Marketing Gold, Privacy Dynamite

The question is what happens to this profile? Obviously, each profile is worth its weight in gold to advertisers. With information, they can target their message to exactly the right audience. But even if search technologies offer this capability, the vast majority of providers have resisted the temptation.

The Google Toolbar has been around for four years, and if you install the advanced version, the End User License Agreement says that the toolbar will send information about every URL you visit back to Google.

While this is for the relatively benign purpose of retrieving that site’s page rank and other information, the fact is that Google has the ability to track each and every Web page you visit. At least Google is up front about letting you know. Other search tool bars and spyware apps aren’t quite so ethical.

Suranga Chandratillake, the CTO of Blinkx, indicated that they had the ability to incorporate a fairly basic level of artificial intelligence into the product to make the search suggestions more relevant to the individual user but had chosen not to. “Early users indicated they didn’t like this idea. Privacy is a big concern for them.”

It appears that search providers and contextual advertising providers are setting wheels in motion that will bring an inevitable head on collision between the wishes of advertisers hoping for better targeted vehicles and users concerned about their privacy.

At this point, the more ethical advertisers are standing on the right side of a gray and sketchy line that’s determining what should be done with the mounds of information collected from users.

Either contextual advertising is being served based solely on the nature of the job at hand with no reference to a stored profile, or the information is just sitting there, collecting dust in a data warehouse on some gargantuan hard drive. But no one’s saying they’re throwing that data away. I get the feeling they’re all eyeing each other nervously, waiting for somebody to step over the line.

Search has the ability to become smarter and more helpful. But as anyone old enough to remember “2001: A Space Odyssey” can tell you, an all-knowing, irritatingly polite computer isn’t always mankind’s best friend.