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Great commercial, but the main message for me is that the Bing team has been doing something right. The quality of other search engines has caught up to the po

Great commercial, but the main message for me is that the Bing team has been doing something right. The quality of other search engines has caught up to the point where brand is an important factor in the fight for search market share. Google's product is no longer clearly better than the alternatives. Notice how most of the rest of the commercials on are for things like snack food, beer and cars where the image and consumer perception of the product are more important than the product itself. Those companies products don't do enough to differentiate themselves, so brand advertising has to do it. This could be a sign that the search (really the information discovery) market is maturing and that product innovation will slow down as the major players focus all their attention on marketing and battling for market share. I hope not. While Google Search is good, it's nowhere near good enough yet.

Alex3917 17y ago
"Notice how most of the rest of the commercials on are for things like snack food, beer and cars where the image and consumer perception of the product are more important than the product itself." Interestingly enough, the reason those companies buy all those ads is that enough Americans go to the store to buy more beer/chips during halftime that the ads actually pay for themselves before the end of the game. IIRC the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.
- llimllib 17y ago
  And how would they be able to distinguish between a sale due to an ad and one that's not? Or are you merely saying that "these companies" (like CareerBuilder? or do you just mean Coke, Bud Light, and Doritos?) have so much revenue that merely Super Bowl Sunday pays for the ads?
  - endtime 17y ago
    Well, they have sales data from before the ad ran, and then they get sales data from after the ad ran. It's not a perfectly controlled experiment, but if the ad has an impact (or doesn't) they'll be able to tell.
    - patio11 17y ago
      Or you run the ad in some markets, don't run it in other markets, and watch the relative numbers. A/B testing: not just for Internet micro-businesses and Google.
      - endtime 17y ago
        Well, yes, but I am pretty sure everyone sees the same Superbowl ads.
    - llimllib 17y ago
      It's so far from a perfectly controlled experiment as to be useless. You have sales before the ad ran (when it wasn't the super bowl), and you have sales after (when it was the super bowl). That's a huge confounding factor; everybody buys chips, soda and beer on Super Bowl Sunday. They're not able to tell right away. They pay people like Nielsen millions of dollars to analyze the effectiveness of their ads at super bowl time. Those folks do regression analysis of the sales figures compared to previous years, with the knowledge of how sales in general have been, sprinkle with some bullshit so that the client will hear what they want to hear, and then deliver them back to the companies that ran the ads. (My brother does this job). My point: they don't really know, and it's not at all easy to know. edit @jonknee since HN won't let me reply: Except that you're advertising Doritos more than those other brands. How much of that purchase effect spike is due to your other advertisements, how much is due to super bowl ads, and how much is due to people simply feeling like Doritos are an appropriate super bowl snack?
      - jonknee 17y ago
        If you have only one type of chip then it would be very hard to tell, but if you advertise for Doritos and Doritos sales spike 4x as much as your 10 other brands that weren't being advertised it's not hard to do the math.
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    You look for the change in sale rates before the ad and after it. If there's a big discontinuity right when the ad ran, it's not a fair assumption that it was because of the ad.
    - llimllib 17y ago
      but the big discontinuity could be caused by the frikkin super bowl. You know, the one where everybody buys chips and soda and beer. (This is actually a bit unfair of me; my brother makes models to analyze the effectiveness of ads for Nielsen, so I know a bit about how difficult it is to figure out)
- heyitsnick 17y ago
  "IIRC the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.", can you provide any further information or links on this? Shocking if true, and my quick google searching was fruitless.
  - crad 17y ago
    At one time, I was the CIO for a nation-wide retail chain. All of our systems were real-time and we had the ability to see sales as they happened. A lot of companies use local servers in store locations that dial home and upload data nightly. In the brick retail environment, that's pretty close to real-time.
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    As crad suggests in his reply, never, ever make the mistake of thinking grocery-store chains are managed by knuckle-dragging morons. Grocery retailing is a hell of an interesting business. A grocery store is like a miniature, specialized Disneyland. Rule #1: everything you see, from shelf height to lighting to back-end IT, is intentional. Rule #2: in the event you see something that looks arbitrary or unimportant, see rule #1.
    - waterlesscloud 17y ago
      When you think about the tiny margins grocery stores survive on (1% is the commonly quoted stat), it's easy to see that they're forced to be well run. Make many mistakes and they're out of business.
    - andrewljohnson 17y ago
      Never make the mistake of thinking this is equally true of all chains. Some chains, such as Giant Eagle, are known for their data mining. Others just follow the leader.
    - arethuza 17y ago
      I don't know about the US (I suspect it will be the same) - but the chains in the UK compete with each other like a bunch of hyperintelligent velociraptors. Quite good for customers though - in the (rather affluent) area where I live we have a Sainsburys, Waitrose and M&S food store and they are clearly locked in polite but vicious competition.
whopa 17y ago
Bing being merely as good as Google means the Bing team haven't done enough. That means they have to compete on brand, and that's really hard since Google has a stronger brand. Yahoo's search results have been on par with Google for most people's purposes for a while, but that hasn't helped them. To compete with Google on search you have to do to Google what Google did to AltaVista: be noticeably better, consistently. As you said, Google is nowhere near good enough yet. So this is what Google is scared of, and that's why it's in their best interest to keep innovating, because otherwise someone somewhere might beat them to the next real breakthrough. Bing so far has failed by not making any real technical progress, and only reaching parity. That means right now they have to compete on brand, and that sucks for them.
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  Exactly! Thank Cthulhu for competition.
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  It sucks for Google too. The very last thing they want is the commoditization of search. Resisting brand advertising is likely a result of wanting to limit the perception of being a commodity. They'd MUCH rather have the perception that they don't need to compete on brand, that they're technically much better than everyone else. The fact that they're doing lifestyle branding is actually a pretty bad sign. It means they feel Bing represents a real threat. Lucky for Google, Microsoft sucks at advertising. Imagine if they had to compete with someone who was as good at lifestyle branding as Coca-Cola.
teye 17y ago
Tell us why you think Bing is as good as Google.
- ambiate 17y ago
  Bing had my site indexed 4 days before google, and updates it more regularly! That's about all I can think of
  - waterlesscloud 17y ago
    Bing is definitely faster and more regular on new sites. Seen it time and again. But I don't know if that matters in the end. Certainly not as much as update speed on the major sites, where Google is very good.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - stoprock 17y ago
      Pretty anecdotal. In that vein, I definitely see far more google IPs in my app logs when they are new and have no traffic. When I see traffic that isn't someone with a beta invite or some bot trying to find a PHP exploit, it's pretty much always google. In fact, I just checked on two sites right now and I'm seeing 66.249.67.152, 66.249.67.49 and 66.249.68.123, all of which are googlebot. I see one yahoo IP (67.195.111.167) and nothing from msn or bing.
      - waterlesscloud 17y ago
        I went back and looked, and on my three newest sites, Bing was first by several days. Oddly, Yahoo is my most frequent on those. Not the case with older sites. Maybe it's more random that I would have imagined.
- chadaustin 17y ago
  The Bing iPhone app has awesome support for movie times and locations. The Google iPhone app is a collection of annoying pop-out-to-safari links.
ubernostrum 17y ago
the main message for me is that the Bing team has been doing something right Judging based on the ads, I wouldn't agree. Bing's TV spots fall into two groups: 1. A litany of random obnoxiousness followed by some dude saying "BING". We don't see someone getting better results from Bing, we just see someone obnoxiously spouting crap and then associate that with the brand. Whoops. 2. People trying to answer a question, getting stressed and trying out Bing. Where... well, they don't actually search. They just stare at a background image of a Japanese garden or something, and we're apparently supposed to assume that this makes everything better. Again we don't see how Bing's search results are of benefit to a user, and the message here seems to be that Bing is all style and no substance. Contrast with Google's Super Bowl spot: it consists entirely of showing someone using Google, and presents a coherent narrative of how Google search results are having a positive effect on the user's (off-screen) life. Best of all, the narrative it presents is a cute love story. This is sort of like the contrast between the "iDon't" spots and Apple's own iPhone ads; the Droid spots all focused on bashing the iPhone to the exclusion of showing what was good about the Droid, while the iPhone spots just... showed how useful an iPhone is.
- lmkg 17y ago
  You're missing the point. Google feels a need to respond to Bing, which it hasn't before. However stupid you may think the ads are, Google is responding as if Bing is a (potentially) legitimate threat.
  - arethuza 17y ago
    Of course it is a legitimate threat - if Bing started doing searches in any consistently better way than Google I'd use that. I have about as much loyalty to Google as a service as I did to Altavista: i.e. practically none. I suspect others think this way and Google knows it.
    - gaius 17y ago
      Google's index is increasingly polluted. Let me give you an example, the other day I needed the exact address of an electronics store, I entered the name of the company and the street it was on. The top search results were "places to eat near..." - WTF? Who searches for places to eat near a named shop!? Similarly, if you search for "X review" you will mostly get pages that are just affiliate links to retailers and the text "Be the first to write a review of X!" Right now Bing is a better search engine even if the only reason is that fewer people are trying to game it. The thing that makes Google most useful is searching other people's sites (e.g. adding +site:news.bbc.co.uk to your search terms). As a standalone service, they're going the way Altavista went.
nzmsv 17y ago
From pg's article (http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html): ...have you ever seen a Google ad? Something is going on here. Admittedly, Google is an extreme case. It's very easy for people to switch to a new search engine. It costs little effort and no money to try a new one, and it's easy to see if the results are better. And so Google doesn't have to advertise. In a business like theirs, being the best is enough. Now we are seeing Google ads. So I guess Google is starting to get worried about competition, and the ease of switching search engines.
- timr 17y ago
  Maybe this is just what you do when you've got a lock on 95% of your market, and you're massively profitable. Defensive maneuvers make more sense when you're executing flawlessly on the offensive front, and you've got resources to spare.
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    I'm inclined to take Eric Schmidt's blog post on this at face value, i.e. Google had a YouTube video with an overwhelmingly positive response and $20B cash in the bank, so they figured they might as well run it as a SuperBowl ad.
  - albertsun 17y ago
    Google search share is 65.7% according to ComScore. Pretty dominant, but nowhere near 95%. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/comScore_Releases_December_2009_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/c...
- arethuza 17y ago
  I've seen quite of posters for Google Chrome, which struck me as a bit odd that a company that depends on high tech advertising would resort to such a low tech medium.
- gaius 17y ago
  Google are advertising everywhere in London. You can't get on a Tube without seeing a billboard-sized ad for Chrome on the platform. They take out ads in the freesheets too. This has been going on for several months now.
lallysingh 17y ago
Or it could be a sign that google recognizes that a good portion of the market doesn't care about search quality. It's not 1999 anymore, the web's gone fully commercial, and users are as easily swayed by branding as they are by product quality. In my book, this was google refusing to lose customers to branding by meeting Microsoft move-for-move. Google's technical innovations are their technical response to MS.
fab13n 17y ago
Great analysis; however, I'm not sure it's a brand-building ad. It sums up to "Google was at the heart of all the good things that happened to that guy, and it unobtrusively helped it to happen right". That's more of a "we really are not evil" thing, to balance Eric Schmidt's screw-up on privacy, or Jobs' and Balmer's attacks, IMO. Google has kept an amazing amount of public sympathy, given their hegemony on the web, and there are now threats that it might change. Microsoft's hegemony is based on corporate customers (the Windows/Office 22 catch), who don't care about their partners' ethics or image. Google's success is based on the public, it can be jeopardized by the loss of public support.

Alex3917 17y ago

"Notice how most of the rest of the commercials on are for things like snack food, beer and cars where the image and consumer perception of the product are more important than the product itself." Interestingly enough, the reason those companies buy all those ads is that enough Americans go to the store to buy more beer/chips during halftime that the ads actually pay for themselves before the end of the game. IIRC the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.

llimllib 17y ago
And how would they be able to distinguish between a sale due to an ad and one that's not? Or are you merely saying that "these companies" (like CareerBuilder? or do you just mean Coke, Bud Light, and Doritos?) have so much revenue that merely Super Bowl Sunday pays for the ads?
- endtime 17y ago
  Well, they have sales data from before the ad ran, and then they get sales data from after the ad ran. It's not a perfectly controlled experiment, but if the ad has an impact (or doesn't) they'll be able to tell.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Or you run the ad in some markets, don't run it in other markets, and watch the relative numbers. A/B testing: not just for Internet micro-businesses and Google.
    - endtime 17y ago
      Well, yes, but I am pretty sure everyone sees the same Superbowl ads.
  - llimllib 17y ago
    It's so far from a perfectly controlled experiment as to be useless. You have sales before the ad ran (when it wasn't the super bowl), and you have sales after (when it was the super bowl). That's a huge confounding factor; everybody buys chips, soda and beer on Super Bowl Sunday. They're not able to tell right away. They pay people like Nielsen millions of dollars to analyze the effectiveness of their ads at super bowl time. Those folks do regression analysis of the sales figures compared to previous years, with the knowledge of how sales in general have been, sprinkle with some bullshit so that the client will hear what they want to hear, and then deliver them back to the companies that ran the ads. (My brother does this job). My point: they don't really know, and it's not at all easy to know. edit @jonknee since HN won't let me reply: Except that you're advertising Doritos more than those other brands. How much of that purchase effect spike is due to your other advertisements, how much is due to super bowl ads, and how much is due to people simply feeling like Doritos are an appropriate super bowl snack?
    - jonknee 17y ago
      If you have only one type of chip then it would be very hard to tell, but if you advertise for Doritos and Doritos sales spike 4x as much as your 10 other brands that weren't being advertised it's not hard to do the math.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  You look for the change in sale rates before the ad and after it. If there's a big discontinuity right when the ad ran, it's not a fair assumption that it was because of the ad.
  - llimllib 17y ago
    but the big discontinuity could be caused by the frikkin super bowl. You know, the one where everybody buys chips and soda and beer. (This is actually a bit unfair of me; my brother makes models to analyze the effectiveness of ads for Nielsen, so I know a bit about how difficult it is to figure out)
heyitsnick 17y ago
"IIRC the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.", can you provide any further information or links on this? Shocking if true, and my quick google searching was fruitless.
- crad 17y ago
  At one time, I was the CIO for a nation-wide retail chain. All of our systems were real-time and we had the ability to see sales as they happened. A lot of companies use local servers in store locations that dial home and upload data nightly. In the brick retail environment, that's pretty close to real-time.
- CamperBob 17y ago
  As crad suggests in his reply, never, ever make the mistake of thinking grocery-store chains are managed by knuckle-dragging morons. Grocery retailing is a hell of an interesting business. A grocery store is like a miniature, specialized Disneyland. Rule #1: everything you see, from shelf height to lighting to back-end IT, is intentional. Rule #2: in the event you see something that looks arbitrary or unimportant, see rule #1.
  - waterlesscloud 17y ago
    When you think about the tiny margins grocery stores survive on (1% is the commonly quoted stat), it's easy to see that they're forced to be well run. Make many mistakes and they're out of business.
  - andrewljohnson 17y ago
    Never make the mistake of thinking this is equally true of all chains. Some chains, such as Giant Eagle, are known for their data mining. Others just follow the leader.
  - arethuza 17y ago
    I don't know about the US (I suspect it will be the same) - but the chains in the UK compete with each other like a bunch of hyperintelligent velociraptors. Quite good for customers though - in the (rather affluent) area where I live we have a Sainsburys, Waitrose and M&S food store and they are clearly locked in polite but vicious competition.

whopa 17y ago

Bing being merely as good as Google means the Bing team haven't done enough. That means they have to compete on brand, and that's really hard since Google has a stronger brand. Yahoo's search results have been on par with Google for most people's purposes for a while, but that hasn't helped them. To compete with Google on search you have to do to Google what Google did to AltaVista: be noticeably better, consistently. As you said, Google is nowhere near good enough yet. So this is what Google is scared of, and that's why it's in their best interest to keep innovating, because otherwise someone somewhere might beat them to the next real breakthrough. Bing so far has failed by not making any real technical progress, and only reaching parity. That means right now they have to compete on brand, and that sucks for them.

MikeCapone 17y ago
Exactly! Thank Cthulhu for competition.
waterlesscloud 17y ago
It sucks for Google too. The very last thing they want is the commoditization of search. Resisting brand advertising is likely a result of wanting to limit the perception of being a commodity. They'd MUCH rather have the perception that they don't need to compete on brand, that they're technically much better than everyone else. The fact that they're doing lifestyle branding is actually a pretty bad sign. It means they feel Bing represents a real threat. Lucky for Google, Microsoft sucks at advertising. Imagine if they had to compete with someone who was as good at lifestyle branding as Coca-Cola.

teye 17y ago

Tell us why you think Bing is as good as Google.

ambiate 17y ago
Bing had my site indexed 4 days before google, and updates it more regularly! That's about all I can think of
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  Bing is definitely faster and more regular on new sites. Seen it time and again. But I don't know if that matters in the end. Certainly not as much as update speed on the major sites, where Google is very good.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - stoprock 17y ago
    Pretty anecdotal. In that vein, I definitely see far more google IPs in my app logs when they are new and have no traffic. When I see traffic that isn't someone with a beta invite or some bot trying to find a PHP exploit, it's pretty much always google. In fact, I just checked on two sites right now and I'm seeing 66.249.67.152, 66.249.67.49 and 66.249.68.123, all of which are googlebot. I see one yahoo IP (67.195.111.167) and nothing from msn or bing.
    - waterlesscloud 17y ago
      I went back and looked, and on my three newest sites, Bing was first by several days. Oddly, Yahoo is my most frequent on those. Not the case with older sites. Maybe it's more random that I would have imagined.
chadaustin 17y ago
The Bing iPhone app has awesome support for movie times and locations. The Google iPhone app is a collection of annoying pop-out-to-safari links.

ubernostrum 17y ago

the main message for me is that the Bing team has been doing something right Judging based on the ads, I wouldn't agree. Bing's TV spots fall into two groups: 1. A litany of random obnoxiousness followed by some dude saying "BING". We don't see someone getting better results from Bing, we just see someone obnoxiously spouting crap and then associate that with the brand. Whoops. 2. People trying to answer a question, getting stressed and trying out Bing. Where... well, they don't actually search. They just stare at a background image of a Japanese garden or something, and we're apparently supposed to assume that this makes everything better. Again we don't see how Bing's search results are of benefit to a user, and the message here seems to be that Bing is all style and no substance. Contrast with Google's Super Bowl spot: it consists entirely of showing someone using Google, and presents a coherent narrative of how Google search results are having a positive effect on the user's (off-screen) life. Best of all, the narrative it presents is a cute love story. This is sort of like the contrast between the "iDon't" spots and Apple's own iPhone ads; the Droid spots all focused on bashing the iPhone to the exclusion of showing what was good about the Droid, while the iPhone spots just... showed how useful an iPhone is.

lmkg 17y ago
You're missing the point. Google feels a need to respond to Bing, which it hasn't before. However stupid you may think the ads are, Google is responding as if Bing is a (potentially) legitimate threat.
- arethuza 17y ago
  Of course it is a legitimate threat - if Bing started doing searches in any consistently better way than Google I'd use that. I have about as much loyalty to Google as a service as I did to Altavista: i.e. practically none. I suspect others think this way and Google knows it.
  - gaius 17y ago
    Google's index is increasingly polluted. Let me give you an example, the other day I needed the exact address of an electronics store, I entered the name of the company and the street it was on. The top search results were "places to eat near..." - WTF? Who searches for places to eat near a named shop!? Similarly, if you search for "X review" you will mostly get pages that are just affiliate links to retailers and the text "Be the first to write a review of X!" Right now Bing is a better search engine even if the only reason is that fewer people are trying to game it. The thing that makes Google most useful is searching other people's sites (e.g. adding +site:news.bbc.co.uk to your search terms). As a standalone service, they're going the way Altavista went.

nzmsv 17y ago

From pg's article (http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html): ...have you ever seen a Google ad? Something is going on here. Admittedly, Google is an extreme case. It's very easy for people to switch to a new search engine. It costs little effort and no money to try a new one, and it's easy to see if the results are better. And so Google doesn't have to advertise. In a business like theirs, being the best is enough. Now we are seeing Google ads. So I guess Google is starting to get worried about competition, and the ease of switching search engines.

timr 17y ago
Maybe this is just what you do when you've got a lock on 95% of your market, and you're massively profitable. Defensive maneuvers make more sense when you're executing flawlessly on the offensive front, and you've got resources to spare.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  I'm inclined to take Eric Schmidt's blog post on this at face value, i.e. Google had a YouTube video with an overwhelmingly positive response and $20B cash in the bank, so they figured they might as well run it as a SuperBowl ad.
- albertsun 17y ago
  Google search share is 65.7% according to ComScore. Pretty dominant, but nowhere near 95%. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/comScore_Releases_December_2009_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/c...
arethuza 17y ago
I've seen quite of posters for Google Chrome, which struck me as a bit odd that a company that depends on high tech advertising would resort to such a low tech medium.
gaius 17y ago
Google are advertising everywhere in London. You can't get on a Tube without seeing a billboard-sized ad for Chrome on the platform. They take out ads in the freesheets too. This has been going on for several months now.

lallysingh 17y ago

Or it could be a sign that google recognizes that a good portion of the market doesn't care about search quality. It's not 1999 anymore, the web's gone fully commercial, and users are as easily swayed by branding as they are by product quality. In my book, this was google refusing to lose customers to branding by meeting Microsoft move-for-move. Google's technical innovations are their technical response to MS.

fab13n 17y ago

Great analysis; however, I'm not sure it's a brand-building ad. It sums up to "Google was at the heart of all the good things that happened to that guy, and it unobtrusively helped it to happen right". That's more of a "we really are not evil" thing, to balance Eric Schmidt's screw-up on privacy, or Jobs' and Balmer's attacks, IMO. Google has kept an amazing amount of public sympathy, given their hegemony on the web, and there are now threats that it might change. Microsoft's hegemony is based on corporate customers (the Windows/Office 22 catch), who don't care about their partners' ethics or image. Google's success is based on the public, it can be jeopardized by the loss of public support.