Two interesting studies in the past week about search engines. One seems to say that nobody should bother trying to best Google and another says that Google is being well bested.
SurveyMonkey recently ran a study about SEO assumptions that compared respondents responses to search results from both Google and Bing. Users were given a set of results based on the same search done on each search engine. When the results were handed to the participants, Google search results were voted as being the best. Then the actual results were switched from Bing to Google so that each engine showed the results obtained by the competitor. Again, the “Google Page” was selected even though the actual results were the ones from Bing.
Another study challenged people’s perceptions of the “Bing it On” campaign which pits Google and Bing against each other like in the soft drink ads. Apparently people don’t believe that the results are accurate and again, side with Google. Butler University in a recent study found that search engine ChaCha actually topped Google with the best answers over 4,000 searches. You can guess the reaction to those results as well.
The moral of this story is that if you can build a really solid brand, you can become almost impervious to doubts about that brand. And number two, there are search engines other than Google which work.
By Don MacMelville