When asked exactly what it is I do, responding with ?managing pay-per-click advertising? or even ?writing online advertising? doesn?t seem specific or sufficient enough explanation for many. So often have I found myself succumbing and short-handedly describing my challenging new work as ?working with Google AdWords.? It seems Britons find it easier to wrap their brains around ?adverts on Google? than of PPC in general. What?s more, with the recent news that Google has now overtaken?Microsoft to become the world?s second largest IT firm, it?s clear that the company?s global internet ubiquity and dominance is definitely a chief issue in PPC and across all internet-based business.
Having grown up during the browser and ?search engine wars? of the noughties ? when competition was abound, and the likes of AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo! and MSN Search all seemed to be? just as dominant and valid as Google (when there still really was a choice) ? the vernacular at my disposal when having to explain PPC to ?civilians? definitely made it simpler to just use Google as my reference point.
Plainly, Google has very truly eliminated any pre-existing element of choice there may have been when opening a browser and starting to surf.
Perusing the PPC blogosphere, it?s become clear to me that Google?s dominance was at the base of much discussion within the industry ? and quite as one would expect too. This year has seen a small handful of topics essentially dominate most of the conversation:
- The on-going battle Google has with its primary English-language rivals ? Yahoo! and Bing.
- Google?s performance (or comparative lack thereof) in China?s market of half a billion users, increasingly outstripped by Baidu.
- The seeming inability of the social media oligarchy to effectively utilise search and their massive user-base to truly compete with search.
- And most recently, Apple?s massive mistake of attempting to live without Google Maps built in to the iPhone 5.
Yet the most interesting subject for a tech-savvy, Earl Grey-sipping, Google-weaned Briton such as myself remains relatively under-discussed. How can Bing-powered searches account for some 34% of the US search engine market?
Baidu?s dominance over Google in China (some 83% compared to Google?s 11%) is somehow less surprising by comparison. Historically, Google?s presence in China has been rather rocky (due in some part to prevalent authoritarian censorship policies in China). What?s more, Baidu simply has a better?understanding?and?experience of the Chinese market and, most importantly, the language.
However this explanation clearly holds no sway when attempting to divulge what it is that puts Google so far ahead of the competition in the UK, in comparison to the USA. I found it striking when Google hit its highest recorded US market share this?May with 66.7% ? mainly as I knew their UK market share was over 90%. So how is it that the US has managed to avoid giving Google quite as much quarter as here in the UK?
As a search engine, Google?s main appeal and edge during the aforementioned ?search engine wars? in the early scramble for the internet, was in its innate simplicity and ergonomically universal design.
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These two early examples comparing Yahoo and Google?s homepages from 1995 & 1997 respectively show just how little has really changed, but also the main reasons for Google?s early success. Plain and simple searching was the aesthetic, with users guided instantly to their single choice on the page: the search box. Yahoo?s in comparison was awash with search options and content, colours and words.
In those formative days of search, the entirely ?internet ignorant? masses of the late-90s simply found Google?s approach less confusing. It?s worth noting that at the time, Google?s search results were often raved to be of the highest quality as well ? yet it is this author?s opinion that aesthetics would?ve trumped results in those early days. What?s more, it?s interesting to see which direction Bing chose to follow some 15 years later when designing its own homepage?
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So could the initial success of Google?s design simply explain it all? Clearly the early days of internet search were when typical habits and modus operandi for internet searching were formulated. Could Britons just have been less willing to let go of these habits in the successive years?
It?s definitely worth mentioning how Yahoo!?s homepage and its US-specific news and content is arguably what won it an American audience during the Internet?s advent. Yahoo never quite captured the minds of the UK market on this front, and its UK-aimed content remains decidedly lacking when one compares the competition provided by UK newspapers and online content factories such as Huffington Post. This was perhaps the real genius of Google?s design: its rudimentary lack of personality and identity.
Where Yahoo! and MSN felt distinctly American to British users, Google felt more universal, and certainly unobtrusively indistinct and more compatible with a UK audience.
Something else to consider is the habitual differences between the UK and the US, as made evident when investigating default search engine providers that come with the various major web browsers (and their market shares). One could argue that being the default search provider with a browser is the most powerful way to gain users. Microsoft?s Internet Explorer (with Bing/MSN-powered default search) has certainly dominated in this arena for quite some time, while Google?s Chrome and Mozilla?s Firefox ? both of which have Google as their default search engine ? somewhat appropriately represent an alliance in opposition against Internet Explorer dominance (not unlike the Bing/Yahoo search engine ?alliance? against Google search). Google?s position as the default search engine for Firefox came at no small cost in the form of a $100 million investment in 2010.
So it?s clear that the major search engine providers understand their strengths and weaknesses. Two years ago, Microsoft invested $100 Million promoting their search engine in the form of Bing?s advertising and marketing budget. Around the same time was when Google spent the aforementioned same amount on securing the default search provider on Firefox.
However, the most revealing aspect of all of this is how Internet Explorer?s continuing (if waning) popularity as the number one browser in the UK as in the US has failed to secure Bing a similar section of the search engine market. IE still owns about 40% of the browser share in the US and about 38% in the UK. One could argue this helps to explain the larger Bing-powered section of the US search market (30%), thus implying that UK users ? 38% of whom still use IE ? must be taking the initiative to actively choose Google as their search engine, changing the search settings in their Explorer.
Although changing one?s search settings in a web browser isn?t the most daunting task imaginable to most, I feel it?s safe to infer that slightly more tech-savvy users are normally more likely to change their search settings in their browser than those less so. Does this mean that the UK?s Internet Users tend to be more tech-savvy? Or does it mean that US users are simply less concerned with their choice of search engine and are therefore happy with their default?
Either way, the coming year is set to see the Internet continue its migration over to mobile ? a still relatively new ?internet space?. The recent furore over iOS 6 and Apple?s Maps application could indicate what the future of search is going to sound like as a fresh wave of arguments arise amidst varying bids to occupy the mobile search market. Perhaps the still-fresh world of mobile represents the methadone Britain needs to wean ourselves off our Google addiction.
Tags | Google, search engines
Source: http://www.thesearchagents.com/2012/10/how-google-search-won-the-hearts-and-minds-of-the-uk/
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