Why did Google win?

No, you haven't missed any awards ceremonies, and yes, there are still a few other search engine companies in business. But consider this: if you've looked at yours or anyone else's server logs lately, you'll see that Google wins in a landslide over all other search referrers. Google is a huge search referrer now.

A typical webmaster's log file might show the following referrer info:

• Google.com: a lot.
• Google.Yahoo.com: about 20% of the number of Google.com referrals.
• AltaVista: a little
• Yahoo: a little
• Everything else including MSN and AOL: fuhgeddabout it, unless you pay heavily for inclusion or clicks.

How did this happen? And is the trend likely to reverse itself anytime soon?

Industry observers offer a variety of explanations for Google's runaway popularity with consumers. They break down as follows.

Timing
Seth Godin, a leading authority on permission marketing and buzz building, puts timing at the top of his list of reasons for Google's success. Being a later mover meant that this was the "third wave" or the "new, improved version," argues Godin. "The first wave was the big guys. The second wave (Ask Jeeves, etc.) got swamped in the noise of the first wave. We were ready for version 3."

Andy Feit, Executive VP of Sales and Marketing for Quiver, an enterprise taxonomy software company, points out that Google got into the game at the tail end of the venture capital boom and thus was able to operate as a well-funded private company with some insulation from immediate market demands. "In an era when the venture community was more concerned with page views and unique visitors instead of profitabilty," says Feit, "Google did not need to compete on the same terms as the people they were up against. They could afford to price at a level that lost money on every query. They could afford to forgo the advertising revenue in lieu of a cleaner, faster page."

Godin adds that "the Yahoo deal [to replace Inktomi as Yahoo's spider engine] gave them credibility at just the right moment."

The cognoscenti loved it
A well known principle of buzz as explained by Emanuel Rosen, author of The Anatomy of Buzz, is the degree to which influential "network hubs" take to a new product, book, movie, etc. The cognoscenti can be wrong, of course. While the Palm Pilot successfully made the transition out of the hands of early adopters into a mainstream market, other grand ideas that were embraced by industry publications and commentators, such as pen-based computing, flopped. But in many cases, word of mouth travels best when trusted authorities (what Godin calls "sneezers" in his colorful Unleashing The Ideavirus) truly embrace a new product. For whatever reason, Google seemed hipper than the available options, and many of us noticed small but gratifying things they were implementing on their site.

Clean navigation and singular focus
Many have pointed to Google's clean interface as an important part of what resonated with users. Steve Thomas, CEO of Wherewithal, a provider of enterprise search technology, argues that "it's not so much that Google made their product simple, but rather that they actually marketed SEARCH. When's the last time you heard of Yahoo or Excite spending money to convince people that their search results were better? They seem to have completely abandoned the idea."

AltaVista tried the same tactic, aping Google with its Raging Search product in the summer of 2000. AltaVista corporate strategists decided to return to the company's roots and once again court the "search enthusiast market" - but it was too little, too late. And the site which was supposed to be pure search was, after all, an additional site, which sent mixed signals to consumers. After Raging Search was abandoned, the AltaVista site was once again the only AltaVista site, and following the abandonment of AltaVista's portal ambitions, it is laser-focused on search. But at this stage, it's even later in the game, and most know that AltaVista sees its future as a provider of corporate search software, making consumers even less willing to embrace a site they assume is being abandoned.

The flipside, then, is that the portal wars left the search field wide open for a focused newcomer. AltaVista's failed portal ambitions are well documented, but the broad focus of Yahoo, Excite, and others made them forget their search roots as well, which led them "to ignore their users, and their site logs," says Thomas, who was a senior Netscape engineer before co-founding Wherewithal. "At Netscape, the #1 most hit page besides Home was Search - by a factor of about 10x over the next most hit," he adds. "To this day people still call Yahoo a search engine even though they prefer the term portal. To most users, that's what Yahoo is."

Godin, who has recently produced an e-book on consumer-friendly site design, The Big Red Fez, sums this up succinctly: "They had a banana and they didn't hide it." Godin compares web surfers to the monkeys in scientific experiments who need to go through certain steps to get a banana. If it isn't clear where the banana is (the site's main benefit), the monkey (consumers) won't bother to go looking for it. Google, obviously, served up search and nothing but search at a time when everyone else forgot this basic don't-hide-the-banana principle.

Tara Calishain, publisher of an Internet site and newsletter for research professionals called ResearchBuzz, points to the fact that Google's relevance and unique ranking methods were openly available for the average surfer or research pro to try out, because Google ran its own search site. In what seemed like a good idea at the time, Google's main spider-based competition, Inktomi, adopted a strategy to power search engines for other companies such as Yahoo (which later dropped Inktomi for Google) and MSN.

This might have put Inktomi too much at the mercy of its partners, though it has tried to repatriate some of its control over revenue streams recently with the inception of a paid inclusion model. "With Inktomi I think it was the fact that early on they worked on licensing their tech out to other people, and didn't do a lot to push the Inktomi site itself. A lot of people lost interest in them - including me - because you couldn't tell what they were up to. They were kind of just out there," says Calishain.

Inktomi seemed to let the initial advantage of impressive press clippings, particularly the scientific cachet surrounding Inktomi's co-founder and first CEO Paul Gauthier, slip away from them. They ceased to be in users' faces, so there was no easy way for analysts or consumers to develop an affection for Inktomi.

Detlev Johnson, moderator of i-search, a newsletter for search engine optimization professionals and online marketers seeking search engine submission tips, recently echoed this sentiment in the August 16 edition of the newsletter. Johnson writes:

"Google deserves praise for their relevancy if, for nothing else, they woke journalists up to behold the power of relevant Web search. Until now, no one has been able to view Inktomi unfettered by Looksmart, DirectHit or ODP. That's a difficult PR situation for Inktomi. Google should feel lucky that they can compete without Inktomi in the mix for search audience mind-share where journalists hang out.

"How can online journalists praise something they can't use or see clearly?"

The foundation of buzz: the product itself
Word-of-mouth does not spread if the product doesn't truly impress people. "Google is a great little hack," smiles Steve Thomas. "This allowed Google to win almost every single pure search engine review, making them the only option for anybody that ever read such a review. More than their algorithm was the fact that they took the lead in pages covered. It's hard to argue with 'more' when it comes to a crawler search."

Andy Feit agrees that "first and foremost it came down to Google having a great product. For about a year, Google had a clear relevance advantage over everyone else, and at the same time had a very large index and good performance. At this point, the relevance advantage is no longer a differentiator (I could argue some have even out-Googled Google), but that hardly matters -people still think of them as having the best relevance."

The name
"Google" is just one of those awesome naming coups that comes along every so often. Imagine how far they might have gotten with a clunky name like ArraySearch or HottFind. Or, um, Raging Search.

At this point, all we can do is sit back and observe what Google does with its big lead. It's like an amateur champ (or Tiger Woods?) taking a six-shot lead going into the final round at The Masters. There are hundreds of smart players that can beat you on any given day, snapping at your heels. And the magic can slip away without explanation.