Search Engine Branding

Google continues to lead the search engine business as the following report shows. How did they do this? According to Seth Godin and something I read this morning in his Purple Cow book, it's about the way Google kept things simple and clean. Yahoo became complicated.

Google is to search engine as Kleenex is to facial tissue. However I see a danger on the horizon. As Google expands into areas other than internet searches, they may loose their identity. If they take all their new projects and give them names other than Google, then they can preserve the strength that Google currently has. They did it with G-Mail successfully, where as Google Mail would have taken them down the path that Yahoo Mail took Yahoo.

Lesson for all of us to learn: Make your name mean something, and keep it clean. Now here's the report from MarketingCharts.com:

(Click on the Charts to make them bigger)

Google Takes 66% of US Searches, Ask.com Share Up 18% YOY

Google accounted for 66.44% of all US searches in the four weeks ended February 23, while Ask.com increased its share of searches 18% year over year - from 3.52% of searches in Feb. ‘07 to 4.16% in Feb. ‘08, according to Hitwise.

Yahoo Search and MSN Search, second and third, received 20.59% and 6.95% of US searches, respectively, in February.

The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.87%, Hitwise said.

Google Source of Traffic to Key Industries

Search engines - in particular Google - remain the primary way that internet users navigate to key industry categories.

From Feb. ‘08 to Feb. ‘07, double-digit increases were recorded in the share of traffic from search engines to the Travel, Entertainment, Business and Finance, and Sports categories.