denotes premium content | May 26 2012 
Feature
posted 31 Aug 2004 in Volume 1 Issue 3
G-lessons: simplicity, innovation and integrity
Shortly after going public, the search engine giant continues to innovate, threatening rivals Yahoo!, Microsoft and Apple not only with its Gmail service, but with desktop search software as well. Yet as Neil Budde, former editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online, explains, smaller enterprises needn’t be frightened by Google – they can learn from them.
In the visitor lobby at the Mountain View, California headquarters of Google, where one must sit to await the escort who’ll accompany you into the well-secured offices of the search powerhouse, is a video display that draws your attention away from the variously coloured lava lamps burbling away on the counter. Scrolling by on the display are actual search queries coming into Google from around the world. Even though less than one in 200 queries (selected at random) is shown on the display, it still advances one line per second – a small fraction of the 200,000,000 or so search requests Google handles daily.
The queries scrolling by run the gamut of human knowledge and interest; from searches for highly-specific technical resources to the names of sports and entertainment stars. The queries come in all languages, including a fair number in Unicode characters. Quite a few contain misspellings.
Google’s popularity has been built on ensuring that it delivers relevant information that can satisfy such a wide range of searches. A still-growing population of internet users has been trained that almost any information can be found quickly and easily by simply typing a few words (most of the queries on the display were one to three words long) into Google’s search box.
To some, using the web is synonymous with using Google. For instance, some people still type ‘ebay’ into the search window rather than ‘www.ebay.com’ into their browser address bar (we saw ‘ebay’ scroll past twice in a matter of minutes).
The scrolling display is a testament to the enormous success Google has had in meeting the challenges of information consumers. As such, it also embodies the challenges faced by information professionals across many industries. And that makes it instructive to examine what can be learnt from the Google experience.
Search has become the default way to find information
If you didn’t already understand the importance of search, then Google’s decision to introduce Gmail should bring the point home. The message in Gmail is simple: Google-style search has become such a fundamental part of how many people function today that many of them will want to keep more and more of their data in a system that allows such rapid searching and retrieval of relevant documents (thus the one gigabyte storage capacity offered with the service). And that will only further their reliance on search as the way they sort through information.
Beta testers of Gmail are already raving about the ease and speed of locating old e-mails using the same sort of search used on Google. No longer do you need to organise e-mail into folders and then try to recall which folder you put a message into.
Google is also reportedly working on a software application to bring its style of search to your desktop computer. The idea has competition like Apple and Microsoft picking up the pace – both are expected to include in their next operating system new search capabilities across your hard drive, e-mails and the web.
What started as something of a novelty for consumers – the ability to locate a web page from among millions and millions of pages – has grown into the primary way many people access information. Nielsen//NetRatings found that 76 per cent of active US internet users used a search engine at least once in January 2004. On average, they spent 40 minutes searching that month. “Search engines continue to be the primary tool people use to navigate the web,” said Jason Levin, an analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings.
Search isn’t just how people find an answer to a question or research a topic; it also has become a greater part of how they find news. Yahoo!’s Buzz Index lists the top queries each week, as well as those showing large increases in interest. You might have noticed how ‘Maria Sharapova’ jumped to the top after she won Wimbledon and ‘Tour de France’ began to edge out ‘Euro 2004’ as interest shifted to cycling from soccer.
Users will bring similar expectations to company websites as well as internal applications and demand similar capabilities across corporate databases.
You don’t need a fancy interface – just a thoughtful one
Google’s homepage and results pages have always been models of simplicity, and it has tinkered with them only modestly even as it has expanded its range of services. The search form dominates the homepage, surrounded by only a handful of links. When Yahoo! and others moved away from search toward becoming portals, with homepages crowded with links, Google stood out even more in users’ minds.
Surveys suggest that design issues rank well behind the quality of search results for users. But that may be because Google long ago set the standard for ease of use, and survey respondents assume simplicity is a given for a search engine.
Many other search engines, as well as Yellow Pages and other specialised search sites, have mimicked Google and introduced single-entry-field search forms on their homepages, moving away from multi-field entry forms as their primary offering. Even the relatively new MSN search site has adopted the minimalist appearance popularised by Google. Increasingly, users will expect such simple interfaces, no matter the complexity of the data being searched.
Put the intelligence into processing the query
To make a simple, single-field search form work for users, more thought has to go into processing the query and attempting to distill what set of information might best match it. Google keeps adding a wider range of data to its search engine, allowing queries for news, product pricing and directory information, for instance. Depending on the nature of a query, Google may suggest results from among its news database or the Froogle product database. While you can search these separately, it doesn’t force you to decide up front which collection to search.
Its approach also shows up in how it handles directory information. On a recent business trip, I was trying to find the phone number of friends, but didn’t recall the street address. Entering the husband’s name into a phone directory service produced dozens of results in their city. Entering the wife’s name produced a single entry, which turned out to be someone else. When I switched to Google and entered ‘wife’s name city name’ two results were returned, with the top listing carrying both the husband’s and wife’s name in it. Bingo. By marrying what were probably two entries in the database record into a single listing, Google cleared up any confusion.
A similar focus on query processing and the kind of results returned will make in-house search applications more successful with corporate users.
Text links have many advantages
Another element of Google’s simple interface is the use of text links. While many users have trained themselves to ignore graphical images, assuming they are advertising messages, Google’s text links get noticed and clicked on at higher rates than banner ads. Of course, the higher click-through rate is also because the text ads are highly relevant to the topic of the search and appear prominently on the right side of search pages.
In addition to higher response rates, text-based links have another advantage – they’re easy to change and don’t need artists or programmers to do so. If you find that users aren’t responding because they don’t understand the wording, you can change it. You can easily experiment with different words and see which gets a higher click rate.
Put the quality and integrity of your product first
In Google’s case, their product is their search results. The quality of those results is essentially the user’s perception of how relevant they are to his or her needs. Results that better match what is being searched for is the top request of internet searchers. Google originally caught on because people spread the word its PageRank system generally returned more relevant results than conventional search engines that focused on the contents of each page in isolation. Google’s secret was an understanding of the nature of the web and hyper-linking to other relevant content. The PageRank system evaluates the links between sites as part of how it ranked the relevance of pages.
Google has expanded the number of web pages it indexes in an effort to always have something relevant to match a query. But one problem with having ever more content in its index is that irrelevant results can turn up for some ambiguous queries. Is a search on ‘casting’ about finding actors for movies, trying to catch fish or moldings for industrial use? In an effort to improve relevance for such ambiguous queries, Google has begun experimenting with sorting results based on user-supplied interest data.
Google has always been careful to protect the integrity of its product by making sure that business considerations don’t affect its search results. When it added advertisements in the form of sponsored links to the site, they were clearly distinguished from the so-called natural search results. Google managers are quick to note that sites can’t affect their ranking in the natural search results by advertising or by signing up for AdSense on their sites. Meanwhile,
Yahoo! has announced a paid-inclusion programme that will allow sites to buy their way into search results, seemingly raising ethical questions with some searchers.
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, recently told The Wall Street Journal about a meeting in his early days as “the grownup at Google” when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin opposed an unspecified proposal, even though it “would’ve magnified revenue”. He quoted one of them as saying: “No, that’s completely counter to our principles; there’s no way to do this; it’s completely unacceptable.”
Some Google fans worry that going public will put pressure on the company to modify such principles, even if its adherence to them helped put it in its current position. Google’s IPO filings stress that it will not bow to such pressures; can other companies make a similar claim?
Self-service allows you to support lots of small customers
Google has about 150,000 active advertisers using its system. It does this by offering advertisers a robust set of tools to set up accounts, enter ads and track performance themselves. While this has allowed Google to scale quickly, some sceptics say the process has become too complicated for most small businesses to manage themselves. Thus, the rise of the search engine marketing company seeking to manage ads for firms.
The self-service approach, with only a limited review process, hasn’t been without peril. Google has run into problems with ads that incorporate trademarks as well as complaints about sites selling diet drugs and Nazi paraphernalia.
But any industry needing to serve a large base of small customers can learn from the lessons and make self-service a greater part of their operations, albeit with a heavy focus on ensuring those applications are easy to use.
Continue to innovate, but stick to your strengths
The online medium – and the habits of its users – continues to evolve, requiring constant innovation. Google has continued to improve its search algorithms to achieve more relevant results even as it has expanded its content. It has also improved the tools advertisers have to track their campaigns. But it has also added new products and extensions that build on that core competence – without losing its focus on search. Local search and the Froogle shopping comparison service are but two examples. As noted earlier, even Google’s planned Gmail service is an outgrowth of its search expertise. This climate of innovation is evident even at the most essential level of the company – Google staff are encouraged to experiment during a portion of their work week.
While some may dismiss Google and general web search as not relevant to more complex corporate information-management challenges, it is clear Google and other search engines are setting the standard among information consumers. If information managers know this and ignore it, they do so at their own peril.
This is an adapted version of Neil Budde’s recent report, ‘The Geo-Google Threat: Search Engines Target Local Advertising’.
