Well, I'm currently doing a case analysis of Google and I was wondering whether Google truly had no outright marketing plan and only relied on word of mouth on the internet to boost its popularity to its current levels. How true is it? I'm not from the US so I have no idea whether Google runs any ads on TVs or whatever.
Is google's popularity REALLY due to word of mouth?
- Thread starter ElyrionX
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Google never used ads, but becoming a verb certainly help your popularity(while at the same time showing how popular to already are). Searching for something on the internet and "googling it" have been synonymous for a few years now.
Google's been getting more and more popular for quite a while, and it's all from word of mouth in one way or another. If it appears on TV or in writing, it's not a paid advertisement.
Google's been getting more and more popular for quite a while, and it's all from word of mouth in one way or another. If it appears on TV or in writing, it's not a paid advertisement.
King Jippo
Banned
I always thought Google's popularity was due to word of mouth and the fact that the Google homepage is free from all the clutter and BS found on other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, etc.
That's how it was for me. I heard about it, and when I tried it I adopted it because of its quick loading, good search results and nice interface. Thankfully it's remained uncluttered and quick while adding cool new things like image searches. I'd love to download that Google-based file search program, but it's only for Windows 2000+. I have '98.King Jippo said:
videogamer
Banned
1st time using Google: Used the search box at washingtonpost.com at one time back in high school. Compared to the results search engines gave at the time, the results were pretty darn good. Ironically, the search box at wapo is now run by Yahoo, which I detested at the time.
But yeah, Google decided early on to not spend money on ads and focus elsewhere.
But yeah, Google decided early on to not spend money on ads and focus elsewhere.
I never liked their search engine very much, and thought Yahoo's was way way better so long as you were searching for general topics. Yeah, Google returns a lot of results, but it returns a ton of bullshit that you have to wade through to get to what you're looking for.
It's also pretty easy to manipulate...or so they say. The pages are supposedly ranked in order of how many other pages link to them, so if you can put yourself on top just by cheating and having a ton of friends link you.
It's also pretty easy to manipulate...or so they say. The pages are supposedly ranked in order of how many other pages link to them, so if you can put yourself on top just by cheating and having a ton of friends link you.
King Jippo said:
that's how it was for me too. well, my first encounter with google was someone pointed out that putting in the string (paraphrasing here) "most evil man in the world" and clicking the infamous "i'm feeling lucky" button sent you to microsoft.com. at first i thought it was just amusing, but it turned out to be a good, clean search engine that got me going back for me.
border said:
That's actually *WHY* it works so well. It's not actually that easy to cheat on. You'd have to get millions of people to use a fake link to make it actually affect your ranking very much, and blogs are automatically rated downward anyways.
Basically, every page has a relevance score. Links from a page imbue the page they link to with a similar or lower score. Multiple highly relevant links produce a more relevant result. The system is really very clever and much better than the old way, which was to basically just trust pages equally.
And yahoo has always been the most useless search engine around. Unless you want only pages that go out of their way to go through a lengthy indexing process (and even then, you're still trusting the page itself to indicate its relevance). Google's strength isn't in returning a lot of results, but in returning ones that have authoritative weight higher in the set.
Then how do you explain all the people that have cheated their way to number one? Remember when that guy rigged it so that if you searched "French Military Victories" his France humiliation page woudl come up as the number one result (you would go there instantly if you hit "I'm feeling lucky"). Obviously there are holes since something like that shouldn't be able to usurp the needs of people actually looking for French military history.THE EYE said:
I liked Yahoo because they had a category system. If you searched the name of a band you liked, the relevant category would pop up and you could click it and get a link to all the noteworthy fan sites. Do that with Google and you will get only the band's official site plus a bunch of cruddy e-stores selling their records plus artist profiles on big name sites (VH1, MTV) since it's the big sites that get linked a lot. Amazon links are in the top ten for a lot of groups and musicians -- but really, is anyone looking to buy their stuff going to be using Google? Filter that stuff out, please. Artist-focused message boards also get pretty high rankings...not very helpful if you are just looking for information. Now the fansites get buried on later pages.
Yahoo might not have had the most results, but they were focused and when you clicked a category you knew you were going to get right at what you were looking for.
I won't say that they were outright superior, but I really hated it when Yahoo just switched to the Google engine. The two of them made for a great combination, but just having one is kinda lame.
border said:
Believe it or not, that happened because a *LOT* of people linked to it. And they did it because it was funny, not because of any monetary gain or anything. It's a lot harder to get people to artificially link to your site if there's something in it for you. I also suspect that google simply allowed it to happen when it did. When a site is doing it for gain, they bust them down in the pagerank.
Actually, that's what most blog spammers are trying to do. Use the legitimacy of a blog to pagerank their site upwards. That's why blogs were ranked down. They're doing something now where links can have an attribute that makes search engines skip them and blogs will have that attribute added to comments automatically.
border said:
If only it were that simple. A page's rank is influenced by a lot of things, only one of which is linking. The ranking of the site linking to it affects that page's rank, as well as how long the page has been around and (supposedly) the "order" in which it is linked on another site.
I can't believe you would even compare Google to old-school yahoo, which was utter shit. Put a single word in your header 500 times and you were guaranteed to be the first hit. It was a terrible system, and oftentimes the most relevant queries were nowhere near the first page due to geocities websites that inluded a single word repeated on a black background thousands of times.
psycho_snake
I went to WAGs boutique and all I got was a sniff
I never hear people say "use a search engine", its just "use google". Ive never seen google ad, so it must be from word of mouth.
pestul said:
you do realize that Yahoo for quite a while actually used google to do its searching, right? And then they launched their own software which functioned basically the same way? It always gets me that people proclaim one is "better" than the other, when they are using the exact same technology.
Red Dolphin
Member
King Jippo said:
I agree. Plus the searches are incredibly fast.
I use google and yahoo for completely different searches. If i'm looking for general subjects, I'll use the yahoo directory, but for specific searches I go with google.
And the French Military Victory complaint you have is stupid...the I'm Feeling Lucky button only makes you go directly to the first result displayed. If you typed french military victory and just hit Google Search, you'd see all the results....don't be a maroon
And the French Military Victory complaint you have is stupid...the I'm Feeling Lucky button only makes you go directly to the first result displayed. If you typed french military victory and just hit Google Search, you'd see all the results....don't be a maroon
Yeah, word of mouth for me too. Although, I think that's almost how I've found nearly everything on the net. It's very rare that I go digging for stuff. Most of the time, people just send me links that they got from someone, who got it from someone else and so forth.
I was initally impressed by Google's unclutteredness and I just kept using it. I've never really compared it search for search with other engines because I've never really had to. It works, it has some nice features and there isn't a bunch of useless shit on the page.
I was initally impressed by Google's unclutteredness and I just kept using it. I've never really compared it search for search with other engines because I've never really had to. It works, it has some nice features and there isn't a bunch of useless shit on the page.
videogamer
Banned
Yahoo didn't begin to use Google until around 2000 or so. Before that, they used Inktomi.Nerevar said:
/me happy that he doesn't have to visit four search engines to find what he wants anymore.
I got into google by yahoo. Yahoo used to use google search engine for their searches and when I found that out, I tried to go to google.com and found it less cluttered and less BS. So instead of going to yahoo.com for search, I just go to google.com. And since then never looked back. But I did just found out that yahoo isn't using google anymore which is surprising to say the least cause I thought they were partners or something.
I remember when google only had something like a million different sites or some very low number. Can't remember what the exact text underneath the link said, but it said something like "an experimental brand new web searcher." I gave it a shot, and used it ever since.
Lycos, Askjeeves, and others didn't give me the results I needed when it came to searching what I was searching for. Google did. So I stuck with it.
Lycos, Askjeeves, and others didn't give me the results I needed when it came to searching what I was searching for. Google did. So I stuck with it.
Just a question, how long before the google has to change it's name? Isn't there something with trademarks becoming common domain or something? I remember ads that were for xerox saying don't "xerox it, copy it" or something to that effect. Seems like google is heading down the same road.
SSGMUN10000
Connoisseur Of Tedium
My non-computer savy brother told me about it and been using it ever since. He said a friend recommended it to him. So seems like its been word of mouth.
I remember using google back in the old days, 98 or thereabouts. I was using altavista but a friend of mine kept using google so I stuck with that ever since.
And I agree on the meta search sites. One big let down for google but I am able to look past it :lol
And I agree on the meta search sites. One big let down for google but I am able to look past it :lol
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