Google: Better Mousetrap or Better Brand?

Best technology or best brand?

What is the world’s best search engine? You’d probably reply, Google. But is it really?

That reply is akin to saying that Coke is the world’s best soft drink or McDonald’s makes the world’s best hamburger. It’s the one you’re most likely to choose, but the best? Probably not.

This is the power of successful brands: by positioning in the public’s head as the preeminent choice, they generate loyalty out of proportion to their actual product superiority.

Google was recently adjudged the world’s most valuable brand. The Google logo itself is worth $100bn, because people are more likely to choose a product with the Google brand plastered across it, even when it isn’t significantly better than alternatives.

One informal way to test this is a search engine blind test. You enter a search term into the box, click it and three blind searches from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing are displayed. You choose which you think is the best, and it then reveals the answers. They may surprise you.

Despite Yahoo’s assertion that it’s not a search engine, in our tests it consistently provided the best search results. Google was a distant second, with Bing dead last. Hardly scientific, but with Google holding 78% of US searches (to Yahoo’s 11% and Bing’s 8%), it is unlikely that this market dominance is explained solely by the superiority of Google’s product.

What did YOU find?