The Not So Great Search Engine Market Reach Survey

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1. How much longer will Google hold the title of North America's dominant search engine?

How much longer will Google hold the title of North America's dominant search engine? 1 Year

2 Years

3-5 Years

5-10 Years

The fundamental nature of the Internet will change before Google loses its stranglehold

2. What are the chances of Microsoft buying, cheating or stealing their way to significant market share alongside Google in the next ten years?

What are the chances of Microsoft buying, cheating or stealing their way to significant market share alongside Google in the next ten years? < 1%

< 10%

< 50%

> 50%

> 75%

3. The world has never seen money build a prominent search engine brand, only the other way around (source, me). Advertising search has proven difficult and expensive, ask Ask. Jeeves knows it’s hard to make a search engine seem Cuil. Search engines can’t just collaborate with Timbaland. Bing has been blessed with a $100,000,000 advertising budget. What do you think it will take for Microsoft to properly deal with Google?

The world has never seen money build a prominent search engine brand, only the other way around (source, me). Advertising search has proven difficult and expensive, ask Ask. Jeeves knows it’s hard to make a search engine seem Cuil. Search engines can’t just collaborate with Timbaland. Bing has been blessed with a $100,000,000 advertising budget. What do you think it will take for Microsoft to properly deal with Google? $100,000,000 should do it, if spent right. Like, give a million people a hundred dollars and ask them to use your search engine out of gratitude.

Give a hundred million dollars to starving Africans and ask the western world to use your search engine out of guilt.

Build a search engine that doesn’t have results full of spammy crap-content pages (haha, trick option! The only way to actually do this is to destroy the Google Adsense system!)

Create a new paradigm, a personal search and research portal customizable to the way you use the Internet, well thought out and designed, created from the ground up to exist in the cloud, open source, independent of desktops, call it Rush, or Tides, or Wav… oh shit.

Invest more than $100,000,000 – it’s going to take a lot more. Really.

Lose interest in this whole ‘search’ thing, it’s just a fad.

4. Yahoo has been around since before people who can now beat me in basketball were even born, but neither Microsoft nor Google have ever bothered to buy them. They have solid search technology that they’ve built over the past few years, and an old strong brand in the search market (yes, the only other old, strong brand in the search market). What should Microsoft do?

Yahoo has been around since before people who can now beat me in basketball were even born, but neither Microsoft nor Google have ever bothered to buy them. They have solid search technology that they’ve built over the past few years, and an old strong brand in the search market (yes, the only other old, strong brand in the search market). What should Microsoft do? Nothing, keep building the Bing brand

Buy Yahoo’s technology but brand it as Bing or another name

Buy Yahoo’s name and put $100,000,000 marketing budget behind it

Let Google buy Yahoo instead and concede the only other concentration of market share that exists in the known universe (of North American search engine market share, that is)

5. Home is where the heart is, and where you’re likely to start your search from. What browser home-page style is going to win?

Home is where the heart is, and where you’re likely to start your search from. What browser home-page style is going to win? One search box to rule them all – current Google.com

Not too personal search/news portal – a la current Yahoo.com

Myspace style- left to my own devices to make a personal cesspool of a homepage

iGoogle style – left to some developers’ devices to create my personal Gadget and feed hell

A not necessarily search-centric communication style app-in-the-browser like Google Wave

6. Google has been all you’ve used for search since you were a child (c’mon, mentally you’ve come a long way since 2001), and even though they’ve never really actively pushed their brand on you, you’re a loyal Google searcher (obviously I know you better than you know yourself). How changeable do you think people’s search habits are when it comes to search brands?

Google has been all you’ve used for search since you were a child (c’mon, mentally you’ve come a long way since 2001), and even though they’ve never really actively pushed their brand on you, you’re a loyal Google searcher (obviously I know you better than you know yourself). How changeable do you think people’s search habits are when it comes to search brands? Young people don’t have the same connection to Google that late-20’s early 30’s people do – they’ll switch as soon as Hanna Montanna gets her search spider crawling

Loyalty to search engines has never existed any more than in browsers. Any migrations in search engines will happen slowly as the result of better product alternatives, not as the result of marketing campaigns.

A sexy marketing campaign directed at the right audience should be able to segment the market a little – if it works for everything else, why not for search? (yes, anything can be done wrong – Ask, the search engine for dumb married women)

The Google brand is synonymous with search and has captured a lot of every-day sticky eyeballs on its brand via products like Gmail and iGoogle, so it will be impossible to dethrone as the default mental search option in the foreseeable future

7. Microsoft seems to have had a difficult time creating a brand to associate with search. A lot of effort has been put into the latest effort, Bing.com. What statement most closely resembles the branding advice you would like to give Billy G’s minions heading into 2010?

Microsoft seems to have had a difficult time creating a brand to associate with search. A lot of effort has been put into the latest effort, Bing.com. What statement most closely resembles the branding advice you would like to give Billy G’s minions heading into 2010? Keep marketing Bing as an independent branded entity, just pour money into it, it can’t go wrong, eventually people will change their homepage to it.

Stop marketing Bing as an independent branded entity, stop pissing money, nobody is changing their homepage. You already have a brand, use it. Make a Microsoft search engine and act like Microsoft: integrate it into every little bit of every piece of software and hardware you make, and force it upon the masses. It’s just a search box, not an app, no antitrust, learn from Google.

Just give up already and buy the domain search.com, market the hell out of it as the most advanced and accurate search engine in the world, winner of multiple made-up awards, and stop wasting money on absolutely horrific domain names like bing. Hello?!? Bing?!? Bingo.com would have been better. Actually bingo.com would have been a lot better.

Buy and market the domain Bingo.com as a sear… (okay I’ll admit I haven’t thought this one all the way through)

Now that you’ve finally caught up to Google in terms of search technology with the engineering behind Bing, you’re just five years behind whatever technology Google has been building for the last five years. Go and buy Wolfram Alpha this afternoon please. Then go and buy absolutely every other search company with a hint of innovative technology. Then hire away every top engineer Google has on staff by offering them millions of dollars in shiny steel briefcases, late at night, on moonlit beaches.

8. What do you expect North American Search Engine market share to look like in five years (the legendary sweaty summer of 2014)?

What do you expect North American Search Engine market share to look like in five years (the legendary sweaty summer of 2014)? Goolge 98%, Yahoo 1%, Other 1%

Google 80%, Bing 15%, Yahoo 4%, Other 1%

Google 75%, Yahoo 20%, Bing 4%, Other 1%

Google 80%, Fancy New Player 15%, Other 5%

Google 30%, Bing 30%, Yahoo 30%, Other 10%

Google 30%, Bing 60%, Yahoo 5%, Other 5%

Google 20%, Yabingoo 70%, Wolfgoat Beta 10%

1. Default Section

1. How much longer will Google hold the title of North America's dominant search engine?

2. What are the chances of Microsoft buying, cheating or stealing their way to significant market share alongside Google in the next ten years?

5. Home is where the heart is, and where you’re likely to start your search from. What browser home-page style is going to win?

7. Microsoft seems to have had a difficult time creating a brand to associate with search. A lot of effort has been put into the latest effort, Bing.com. What statement most closely resembles the branding advice you would like to give Billy G’s minions heading into 2010?

8. What do you expect North American Search Engine market share to look like in five years (the legendary sweaty summer of 2014)?