Eric Schmidt likes to claim that competition for Google’s search users is “just one click away”.
It’s easy to brush that off as a gesture to appease regulators, or just plain paranoia. But there’s a clear element of truth to it.
ComScore’s latest analysis of the US search market, released today, rubs in the point that Google’s users have already found out how to click elsewhere: they just aren’t doing it that much yet.
The figures: 73 per cent of US internet users conduct a search on Yahoo or Microsoft at least once a month, compared to the 84 per cent who use Google. They just use Yahoo and Microsoft a lot less often, which is why those companies have a combined search share of only 28 per cent.
So how do you get these people to click more? Sure, underlying search quality and user interface are vital. Microsoft has gone a long way to catching up in this department.
But the problem to breaking Google brand loyalty is one of differentiation. People not only have to think about the service differently, they have to feel differently as well – it has to arouse a different emotional experience. So having a strong rival brand is a good place to start.
As Carol Bartz conceded to The New York Times earlier this month, Yahoo is not a search brand. Yahoo’s users conduct searches on Yahoo because they happen to be there already for other reasons. If they start out wanting to do a search, they probably go straight to Google. It shows in the ComScore figures: each Google user performs 1.8 searches a day on average, compared to 0.8 for the average Yahoo user.
One of the big opportunities for Microsoft is to convince these Yahoo visitors, when they think of search, to think first of Bing. That’s why adding “powered by Bing” to the Yahoo search experience was such an important issue for Microsoft during the recent partnership negotiations.
Qi Lu, the former Yahoo exec who now runs Microsoft’s online division, has quite rightly put heavy emphasis on the importance of building a pure search brand. In fact, it was probably the strongest message from his recent presentation at Microsoft’s analyst day, which is the first time he’s been put in front of a large financial audience. The average Microsoft search user conducts fewer than 0.5 searches a day, so there’s pleny of scope for improvement.
Even if you hate this Bing jingle (and you’d be crazy not to), you have to admit that it’s one of those brands that stick in the mind. There’s still a long way to go, but with so many casual searchers willing to type their queries into whatever search box is at hand, the heavy focus on branding is a good place to start.
