Google AdWords
Friday is officially the day for being distracted and sidetracked, so I decided to set the day rolling by comparing search results between Google And Ask/Jeeves. And I indulged myself by searching for our company name. Come on – you do it too.
The first thing that surprised me was how similar the two appear. I mean ridiculously similar.
Ask’s main nav: Web, Images, Videos, Q&A, More.
Google’s: Web, Images, Maps, News, Video, Mail, More.
And the layouts are almost identical.
Both have the page title in bold, blue and underlined.
Underneath, they have an identically formatted sample from the page. Google use the page’s description META tag, which makes sense. Ask uses the description META tag and their own system, which doesn’t.
Both then have the URL in green, and both have links to the cached versions.
And if you take a look at the actual results, you’ll see more than a slight similarity.
They are listing the same URLs in the same order. Ask has two items for the blog, but aside from that they’re identical..
I understand that Google have now set standards in search. And I agree that there’s no point in reinventing the wheel for the sake of it. But if you want people to switch from your competition’s brand to your own, you need to give them a reason for doing so. Failure to do so means that people will simply stick with what’s familiar.
If your main marketing goal is to simply keep up with your competition, you can only ever hope to remain several steps behind them.
Watch them. See where they fail. Then jump at the opportunity they present. It’s there for the Asking. (very bad pun I know but it’s Friday)
I think I recall Ask providing the auto-complete function on their search form long before Google did. But now Google have gone one step further to show how many results the search term will return. So to be fair to Ask they can innovate too, and Google followed.
Still agree though. It’s not enough if your main aim is just to keep up and I think it’s a bad thing to be obsessed by your competition too.
With Google dominating market share and Ask not having a clear direction, it becomes easy to follow. Ask is attempting to rejuvenate itself. We will see what happens there. What I have noticed is that Micorsoft is looking at new means to capture users, and their bots have been crawling my site more (along with changes to how their bots operate).
Personally, I more interested in semantic search technologies, and there are many good alternative search engines out there (Hakia, Kosmix, Semager) who are causing Google to rethink their methods.
IMO, the main problem with looking at your competitors is that you don’t know whether what they’re doing is working for them. You may be copying their biggest mistakes.
And if it *is* working for them, there is no guarantee that it will work for you too.
If you really need to copy ideas from your competitor, at least *test* them.
But personally I don’t even look at my competitor’s products or websites, as it tends to kill creative thinking.
What you say is true, but: your differing features cannot only be different or a complement to your competition, it must be as good and better. Often, different brands offer slightly different takes on a problem, but none of them gives the complete bit better service.
When competing with google, you need to either dö everything they do, plus something more, or go för Bring a niche player offering somthing very focused. For example, å search engine focusing on financial information on companies, would provide an interesting service for a lot of people and could probably beat Google on that arena, but not as a whole. But Googles service, plus this feature, would be å strong service that could compete for many ads.
BTW: Bring=being, å=a, för=for; iphone is bad för commenting …
Here’s the problem. Google drives all decisions based on data, so every change they’ve made has been proved by testing. Doing something different could hurt you unless you do test it, and even then Google has so many other advantages that people will likely to continue using them. Worse, assuming you came up with something better, I suspect it’s easier for Google to copy or derive something similar than it is for you to remove their other advantages.
Google have a cost-leadership advantage due to their scale, so it’ll cost competitors more to do exactly the same thing, which maintains Google’s research advantage because they can *afford* to spend more. They likely have many more, and closer, server farms so latency will be excellent (measure the search time, especially in further-afield places like Asia or Africa). They’re more “sticky”, with Gmail users helping the brand and default Firefox and IE search bar positions. Google uses their money to buy Blogger.com and other properties which help them to improve awareness of what’s going on out there, increasing the quality of search. Which is why twitter would be so valuable to them.
So really, all Ask.com is doing is trying to maintain parity on their user interface while Google keeps building other advantages.
Still, we all thought Altavista and Yahoo were good enough!