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You're certainly welcome to disagree, but Google would be the first to tell you how relevant the number of pages indexed would be. When you actually measured t

You're certainly welcome to disagree, but Google would be the first to tell you how relevant the number of pages indexed would be. When you actually measured the result relevance number, it turned out that all the major engines were pretty similar, and Google often was not the top one. More importantly though, the observed phenomenon was that no matter how bad the results you presented were, most people didn't switch to another search engine. I get that you're a Google fan, but GMail & Maps weren't part of the search engine. Ironically "real time search" was rolled out as a PR move to counteract the narrative that was being constructed at the time: that Google was falling behind UX innovations in the search engine space. All of the above were rolled out after Google was the dominant player in the search space. Google has absolutely done some amazing things, and their search team is second to none, but the narrative that they became the dominant player because of their technical advantages is very misleading.

chaostheory 6y ago
I am no longer a Google fan. Haven't been for years so there's no bias. > More importantly though, the observed phenomenon was that no matter how bad the results you presented were, most people didn't switch to another search engine. That may be the case today because the results are similar now, but it wasn't the same case years ago. The ancient search engines prior to Google weren't much better than human curated directories like Yahoo. Otherwise, why would anyone switch from them to Google?
- cbsmith 6y ago
  > I am no longer a Google fan. Haven't been for years so there's no bias. I'm sorry, I guess I inferred the wrong conclusion from your statements. I would argue that your perception of Google at the time would be a more significant factor influencing your perception of their performance, but that's actually largely beside the point. > That may be the case today because the results are similar now, but it wasn't the same case years ago. The ancient search engines prior to Google weren't much better than human curated directories like Yahoo. Otherwise, why would anyone switch from them to Google? I think your question at the end there underlines the central point of confusion here. While some people do indeed switch search engines (depending on how you measure, somewhere between 10-30% of users), the vast majority do not. Even when presented with what one would expect to be the worst search engine in the world (one that presented only paid search results), most people would not switch to another engine. So the answer to your question is: most people don't switch from any particular search engine to any other search engine. I would be the first to agree that there was definitely a window of time where Google was observably producing better search results than their competitors, and I'm sure you were amongst many others (including myself) who switched to them at that time... but again, that was a small subset of the population. The search engine space was (and is) very competitive, and it did not take long for competitors to react and close the gap. When we measured performance in 2004, Google did not come out on top. Subsequent measurements produced similar outcomes, although occasionally Google would come out on top. Having more relevant results definitely lead to increased adoption, but only of a small segment of the much larger market. Unless you count AOL searches as part of Google, Google didn't lead in market share until ~2004 (and it really wasn't until 2005 that they were ahead by more than a paper-thin margin). At that point, they had slightly less than 30% market share as compared to present market share which is closer to 90%. Even by 2004, the predominant way that search engines acquired new users was not through "switchers" changing search engines because of better results, but rather because of distribution deals (like the deal Google had with AOL) where a distributor would make a particular engine the first one users were presented with. Think of it this way: how many times have you checked to see if other search engines were performing better than Google? After you switched to using Google, how regularly did you check to see if other alternatives were doing a better job? Most people I've spoken with never even heard of Powerset, let alone tried it to see if it served their needs better than Google. If consumers never check, it's hard to believe product performance makes a difference, right? That's the reality of the search engine business. It certainly helps to be better than everyone else at search, but it is no where near the primary driver of market share.
  - mmmmmbop 6y ago
    Reading your comments, I am experiencing some cognitive dissonance. On one hand, you write very convincingly, and seem to have access to data showing that you are right. On the other hand, my personal experience just tells me that you are wrong. Like the other commenters, I distinctly remember just how much better Google's search was back in the days. And I must be one of those cited 10%-30% of users that try to switch search engines, as in recent years I have tried twice to switch to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons. Both times I had to return to Google because DuckDuckGo's results were just too bad (for me). Perhaps you are right, and it is just an illusion that Google search results are better. But intuition and Occam's razor tells me that most likely it's just still the best general search engine. One example supporting that theory is the fact that users have discovered that other search engines, first Bing, and now Yandex, are better suited for specific types of content, and are indeed using those search engines when searching for that type of content. This goes counter to your claim that users don't switch search engines even when there is a difference in search result quality.
    - cbsmith 6y ago
      If it helps, I was just as surprised by the results at the time. ;-) DuckDuckGo is working at a significant disadvantage as compared to Google. For starters, they have significantly smaller market share. This is no longer like the days of yore when the market was much more fragmented. Google's market share is roughly 18x larger than DDG's. That means they get far less behavioural data to inform their ranking algorithm. That also dramatically impacts the amount of revenue they can feed in to the engine (and the impact isn't linear, as I mentioned elsewhere). Then add on that their privacy efforts mean they are deliberately blinding themselves to much of the data that can be used to tune a search engine. It'd be amazing if their result quality was better. Again, it wasn't an illusion that Google's search results were better, particularly whenever people switched (which mostly happened long before Google gained a dominant market share). I would argue that even with comparable technology, today Google has an overwhelming advantage over competitors. I'd be surprised if it weren't absolutely the best at least amongst any of the alternatives that most people would even consider. That's just not how they got most of their market share. The illusion is that technical advantages were the primary driver of Google's success in the search engine market, and that Google has consistently been the best search engine in the market. The former is just clearly not true (the AOL deal alone helped them way more than any subsequent technical innovations), and the latter flies against the evidence that at the very least during height of the search engine wars, result relevance was very competitive.

chaostheory 6y ago

I am no longer a Google fan. Haven't been for years so there's no bias. > More importantly though, the observed phenomenon was that no matter how bad the results you presented were, most people didn't switch to another search engine. That may be the case today because the results are similar now, but it wasn't the same case years ago. The ancient search engines prior to Google weren't much better than human curated directories like Yahoo. Otherwise, why would anyone switch from them to Google?

cbsmith 6y ago
> I am no longer a Google fan. Haven't been for years so there's no bias. I'm sorry, I guess I inferred the wrong conclusion from your statements. I would argue that your perception of Google at the time would be a more significant factor influencing your perception of their performance, but that's actually largely beside the point. > That may be the case today because the results are similar now, but it wasn't the same case years ago. The ancient search engines prior to Google weren't much better than human curated directories like Yahoo. Otherwise, why would anyone switch from them to Google? I think your question at the end there underlines the central point of confusion here. While some people do indeed switch search engines (depending on how you measure, somewhere between 10-30% of users), the vast majority do not. Even when presented with what one would expect to be the worst search engine in the world (one that presented only paid search results), most people would not switch to another engine. So the answer to your question is: most people don't switch from any particular search engine to any other search engine. I would be the first to agree that there was definitely a window of time where Google was observably producing better search results than their competitors, and I'm sure you were amongst many others (including myself) who switched to them at that time... but again, that was a small subset of the population. The search engine space was (and is) very competitive, and it did not take long for competitors to react and close the gap. When we measured performance in 2004, Google did not come out on top. Subsequent measurements produced similar outcomes, although occasionally Google would come out on top. Having more relevant results definitely lead to increased adoption, but only of a small segment of the much larger market. Unless you count AOL searches as part of Google, Google didn't lead in market share until ~2004 (and it really wasn't until 2005 that they were ahead by more than a paper-thin margin). At that point, they had slightly less than 30% market share as compared to present market share which is closer to 90%. Even by 2004, the predominant way that search engines acquired new users was not through "switchers" changing search engines because of better results, but rather because of distribution deals (like the deal Google had with AOL) where a distributor would make a particular engine the first one users were presented with. Think of it this way: how many times have you checked to see if other search engines were performing better than Google? After you switched to using Google, how regularly did you check to see if other alternatives were doing a better job? Most people I've spoken with never even heard of Powerset, let alone tried it to see if it served their needs better than Google. If consumers never check, it's hard to believe product performance makes a difference, right? That's the reality of the search engine business. It certainly helps to be better than everyone else at search, but it is no where near the primary driver of market share.
- mmmmmbop 6y ago
  Reading your comments, I am experiencing some cognitive dissonance. On one hand, you write very convincingly, and seem to have access to data showing that you are right. On the other hand, my personal experience just tells me that you are wrong. Like the other commenters, I distinctly remember just how much better Google's search was back in the days. And I must be one of those cited 10%-30% of users that try to switch search engines, as in recent years I have tried twice to switch to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons. Both times I had to return to Google because DuckDuckGo's results were just too bad (for me). Perhaps you are right, and it is just an illusion that Google search results are better. But intuition and Occam's razor tells me that most likely it's just still the best general search engine. One example supporting that theory is the fact that users have discovered that other search engines, first Bing, and now Yandex, are better suited for specific types of content, and are indeed using those search engines when searching for that type of content. This goes counter to your claim that users don't switch search engines even when there is a difference in search result quality.
  - cbsmith 6y ago
    If it helps, I was just as surprised by the results at the time. ;-) DuckDuckGo is working at a significant disadvantage as compared to Google. For starters, they have significantly smaller market share. This is no longer like the days of yore when the market was much more fragmented. Google's market share is roughly 18x larger than DDG's. That means they get far less behavioural data to inform their ranking algorithm. That also dramatically impacts the amount of revenue they can feed in to the engine (and the impact isn't linear, as I mentioned elsewhere). Then add on that their privacy efforts mean they are deliberately blinding themselves to much of the data that can be used to tune a search engine. It'd be amazing if their result quality was better. Again, it wasn't an illusion that Google's search results were better, particularly whenever people switched (which mostly happened long before Google gained a dominant market share). I would argue that even with comparable technology, today Google has an overwhelming advantage over competitors. I'd be surprised if it weren't absolutely the best at least amongst any of the alternatives that most people would even consider. That's just not how they got most of their market share. The illusion is that technical advantages were the primary driver of Google's success in the search engine market, and that Google has consistently been the best search engine in the market. The former is just clearly not true (the AOL deal alone helped them way more than any subsequent technical innovations), and the latter flies against the evidence that at the very least during height of the search engine wars, result relevance was very competitive.