I disagree. In marketing terms, Calishain has apparently confused "end benefits" with attributes. She is right to say that users don't care about technology and algorithms per se, but wrong to assume that what they lead to — higher quality search results — is irrelevant. Higher quality search results, the end benefit, is extremely important. Quality is a function of relevance, but also how quickly the results are delivered. When Google came out, its advantage in both areas was clear.

This is not to say the clean interafce doesn't matter, but only to say that the attributes matter more than she says, because they deliver a key end-benefit.

Posted by: Frank on May 18, 2003 12:45 PM

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I have to agree with Frank, in the end the RESULTS made google a success. Ease of use was a major issue, but then again, easy to use crap is still crap.

Posted by: James on May 18, 2003 02:36 PM

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Nope. The average person uses MSN or Netscape's homepage until someone changes it for them. If the search engine doesn't pull up relevent results, they blame the Internet or themselves, not the search engine. Google drew nerds' attention because of the interface, who then popularized Google. It's a side benefit that the search results are better than average.

Posted by: on May 18, 2003 09:57 PM

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Tell us more about this "average person." According to an article in the New York Times, Google accounts for 55% of all web searches. Do the math: for non-google users to be "average" searchers, they must be searching less.

Posted by: Frank on May 18, 2003 10:40 PM

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How did they gather those stats? None of my sites get 55 percent of search traffic from Google. And my rankings are good in Google.

Posted by: on May 19, 2003 09:51 AM

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Not sure where the Times got its statistics, but they shouldn't have used their own referral logs to come up with it.

By the way, I just did a quick review of my logs for April, and people came to my site through a search engine about 15,000 times, and 9,000 of them were through google itself (60%) - - as opposed to people using an engine that runs off google.

Posted by: Frank on May 19, 2003 11:02 AM

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I was one of those 'nerds' who noticed Google when they were in Beta. I started telling all my other nerd (web development folk) friends to start using it. They all looked at me funny then - you see we'd all been doing the web thing for years and had long settled on our personal favorite search engines - no one was talking about search then because it was considered "old hat."

The reason Google got *my* attention was its better search results (relevancy). The quality of the interface and simplicity of the site were nice, but in effect they just didn't do anything wrong in the interface that got in the way of the usefullness they were providing. Bad usability is a barrier -- more so than good usability is a *feature*

Posted by: Lyle, Lyle, Croc O' Lyle on May 19, 2003 09:48 PM

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