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Inktomi, Altavista, AllTheWeb, all later under Yahoo. No question about the "feel", but it's amazing how perception fuels reality. We did a lot of studies of t

Inktomi, Altavista, AllTheWeb, all later under Yahoo. No question about the "feel", but it's amazing how perception fuels reality. We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if you told people they were seeing Google search results (regardless if they were), they'd be more inclined to rewrite their queries and look farther down in the search results, rather than try using another search engine. Beyond the obvious revenue & marketshare benefits, this helped Google two-fold technically: it gave them better data on query rewrites and search results. The hoops you had to jump through to match our exceed their performance were substantial.

JohnBooty 6y ago
We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if you told people they were seeing Google search results This is super-interesting; where might one read more about these studies? Also, when were the studies done? I'm curious about the "when" because I think Google's reputation has slipped quite a bit.
- cbsmith 6y ago
  These were done around 2004-2006 IIRC, I don't know if the brand impact today is the same as it was back then. I'll see if I can find publications, but I think most, if not all of it, was not published. Even when you told people that we were substituting in different search engines and the presentation and layout was not indicative of where the results came from, putting a Google logo on the page produced a measurable difference in behaviour -far more so than changes to the results themselves (admittedly, we never presented ridiculous results, like say results from an entirely different query or a just random landing pages, but we did present them with, for example, purely paid search results). In general though, consumer confirmation bias is not that surprising, right? Particularly with technology brands, it's pretty well established that confidence in the brand leads one to be more likely to attribute failure to one's own "mistakes" and therefore invest in further exploration of the product and/or modifying one's interactions with it. It also diminishes one's belief that another product would produce better results, therefore diminishing interest in exploring alternatives; it also leads one to perceive a product's performance as "better" when it is exactly the same.
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    It makes 100% sense to me that perceived quality would be influenced by a person's feelings towards the brand. In fact I'd be shocked when that's not the case!
  - phire 6y ago
    I actually have no idea how good the search results from other search engines were in 2004-2006. I was exclusively google by then and I'm willing to admit it's entirely plausible it's competitors had similar results. But in 2001-2002, I remember Google having a significantly better search experience. And it was massively better than all it's competitors from the 90s. A large factor were the snippets, which gave you a decent indication if the result was relevant before even clicking. Before the other search engines copied that feature, they would just show the contents of the meta description tag. It also seemed to index a much wider range of sites and ranked them better.
    - cbsmith 6y ago
      > But in 2001-2002, I remember Google having a significantly better search experience. And it was massively better than all it's competitors from the 90s. Yup, I would say it was better through most a good chunk of 2002, which garnered it [checks notes]... about 16% market share at that point. If you include the AOL traffic, that'd be 21%. To put that in perspective, MSN's search market share grew by more than that entire share just in 2003. > A large factor were the snippets, which gave you a decent indication if the result was relevant before even clicking. Before the other search engines copied that feature, they would just show the contents of the meta description tag. Yup, the impact of that UX was huge. It really improved conversion rates. Everyone else figured that out pretty quickly and adopted that. > It also seemed to index a much wider range of sites and ranked them better. Really, it was the ranking function. As their competitors rapidly discovered, having a broader set of sites actually made having a good ranking function so much more crucial.
cromwellian 6y ago
[Google employee, but AltaVista fanboy previously, been on the internet since the 80s and used all of these as they hit the market, and I remember the joy/excitement as each one hit in those days, like a moon landing. Also a DEC Alpha fanboy :)] No way Altavista or Inktomi offered better result than Google. I was a heavy user of both, having adopted AltaVista mainly for similar reasons that I adopted Google, because AltaVista had way fresher and more extensive content than competitors at the time, it offered query modifiers, multi-lingual queries, and media search (images, etc), it even had Babelfish translation. It was obviously, unequivocally better than everything else before it. So the value proposition was unambiguous. Google was similarly an obvious value proposition when it launched. PageRank was objectively better at returning the most salient results. AltaVista did ranking purely based on how the query phrase matched the index. As the Web grew, the amount of junk it would return piled up, it's easy to spam or game such a ranking algorithm. As for Inktomi, you can read Inktomi's own employee account: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2012/05/10/why-google-beat-inktomi-the-inside-story-from-former-engineer/ https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2012/05/10/why-google-beat... Inktomi employees were using Google Search as their primary search engine. If you're not using your own product, you've got problems, how can you expect your customers/users to use it if you won't? Yes, Google's brand is strong, and marginal returns in search quality mean most consumers won't notice the difference between engines, and will judge based on brand or UI presentation now. But to claim Inktomi and AltaVista matched Google Search results I think is rewriting history, when Google launched, the difference in quality was quite obvious and striking. These days search engines have other requirements given how big the web is, how rapidly it changes, and how many adversarial attacks are made against it (blackhat SEO/webspam). You've got to have the infrastructure to index the entire web frequently, you've got to have a robust defense against spam, and you've got to have an even better ranking strategy beyond PageRank because a lot of the long tail may be good content, but doesn't have many authoritative sites linking to it. There's still the possibility of someone upstaging Google, by building a search engine that not only indexes the Web, but has the reading comprehension to understand it, and understand queries from the context of gained knowledge. The first company to do that will kill Google Search, as the results will be self-evidently better. There are queries today that GPT-3 can do that Google can't, they're amazing when they work, mindblowing. If you can scale that to the Star Trek level computer, you win. But you can't displace Google with a 2% improvement in results.

JohnBooty 6y ago

We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if you told people they were seeing Google search results This is super-interesting; where might one read more about these studies? Also, when were the studies done? I'm curious about the "when" because I think Google's reputation has slipped quite a bit.

cbsmith 6y ago
These were done around 2004-2006 IIRC, I don't know if the brand impact today is the same as it was back then. I'll see if I can find publications, but I think most, if not all of it, was not published. Even when you told people that we were substituting in different search engines and the presentation and layout was not indicative of where the results came from, putting a Google logo on the page produced a measurable difference in behaviour -far more so than changes to the results themselves (admittedly, we never presented ridiculous results, like say results from an entirely different query or a just random landing pages, but we did present them with, for example, purely paid search results). In general though, consumer confirmation bias is not that surprising, right? Particularly with technology brands, it's pretty well established that confidence in the brand leads one to be more likely to attribute failure to one's own "mistakes" and therefore invest in further exploration of the product and/or modifying one's interactions with it. It also diminishes one's belief that another product would produce better results, therefore diminishing interest in exploring alternatives; it also leads one to perceive a product's performance as "better" when it is exactly the same.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  It makes 100% sense to me that perceived quality would be influenced by a person's feelings towards the brand. In fact I'd be shocked when that's not the case!
- phire 6y ago
  I actually have no idea how good the search results from other search engines were in 2004-2006. I was exclusively google by then and I'm willing to admit it's entirely plausible it's competitors had similar results. But in 2001-2002, I remember Google having a significantly better search experience. And it was massively better than all it's competitors from the 90s. A large factor were the snippets, which gave you a decent indication if the result was relevant before even clicking. Before the other search engines copied that feature, they would just show the contents of the meta description tag. It also seemed to index a much wider range of sites and ranked them better.
  - cbsmith 6y ago
    > But in 2001-2002, I remember Google having a significantly better search experience. And it was massively better than all it's competitors from the 90s. Yup, I would say it was better through most a good chunk of 2002, which garnered it [checks notes]... about 16% market share at that point. If you include the AOL traffic, that'd be 21%. To put that in perspective, MSN's search market share grew by more than that entire share just in 2003. > A large factor were the snippets, which gave you a decent indication if the result was relevant before even clicking. Before the other search engines copied that feature, they would just show the contents of the meta description tag. Yup, the impact of that UX was huge. It really improved conversion rates. Everyone else figured that out pretty quickly and adopted that. > It also seemed to index a much wider range of sites and ranked them better. Really, it was the ranking function. As their competitors rapidly discovered, having a broader set of sites actually made having a good ranking function so much more crucial.

cromwellian 6y ago

[Google employee, but AltaVista fanboy previously, been on the internet since the 80s and used all of these as they hit the market, and I remember the joy/excitement as each one hit in those days, like a moon landing. Also a DEC Alpha fanboy :)] No way Altavista or Inktomi offered better result than Google. I was a heavy user of both, having adopted AltaVista mainly for similar reasons that I adopted Google, because AltaVista had way fresher and more extensive content than competitors at the time, it offered query modifiers, multi-lingual queries, and media search (images, etc), it even had Babelfish translation. It was obviously, unequivocally better than everything else before it. So the value proposition was unambiguous. Google was similarly an obvious value proposition when it launched. PageRank was objectively better at returning the most salient results. AltaVista did ranking purely based on how the query phrase matched the index. As the Web grew, the amount of junk it would return piled up, it's easy to spam or game such a ranking algorithm. As for Inktomi, you can read Inktomi's own employee account: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2012/05/10/why-google-beat-inktomi-the-inside-story-from-former-engineer/ https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2012/05/10/why-google-beat... Inktomi employees were using Google Search as their primary search engine. If you're not using your own product, you've got problems, how can you expect your customers/users to use it if you won't? Yes, Google's brand is strong, and marginal returns in search quality mean most consumers won't notice the difference between engines, and will judge based on brand or UI presentation now. But to claim Inktomi and AltaVista matched Google Search results I think is rewriting history, when Google launched, the difference in quality was quite obvious and striking. These days search engines have other requirements given how big the web is, how rapidly it changes, and how many adversarial attacks are made against it (blackhat SEO/webspam). You've got to have the infrastructure to index the entire web frequently, you've got to have a robust defense against spam, and you've got to have an even better ranking strategy beyond PageRank because a lot of the long tail may be good content, but doesn't have many authoritative sites linking to it. There's still the possibility of someone upstaging Google, by building a search engine that not only indexes the Web, but has the reading comprehension to understand it, and understand queries from the context of gained knowledge. The first company to do that will kill Google Search, as the results will be self-evidently better. There are queries today that GPT-3 can do that Google can't, they're amazing when they work, mindblowing. If you can scale that to the Star Trek level computer, you win. But you can't displace Google with a 2% improvement in results.