Seth Godin says “Google is better because it feels better”.
True, true…for you and me.
But go ask most teenagers, ages 12-17 what search engine they use. Google doesn’t feel better to them.
Google feels better because the older internet population was conditioned to have it feel better because their results were so much better than yahoo/msn 3-5 years ago. Now it’s habit. I’ve known yahoo’s results were just as relevant as google’s, sometimes more relevant, for some time now, yet I still use google.
Why?
Habit!
However, the up and coming population doesn’t have the google habit. They have the yahoo habit.
Why?
Because yahoo has built for them all the things they want. Chat. Games. Groups. Pictures.
Google has blown it in my opinion.
If your habit were to use yahoo, and when you got into college you felt the yahoo results were as good as google’s, would you switch? No.
It’s just a matter of time. The search landscape is changing.
Most of us don’t want to admit it because google has been such a fairy tale story (like Seth says, “story”), and we don’t want Micro$oft to win out in this, which is looking more and more likely.
Yahoo has been such a blah blah over the years that nobody has confidence in them beating out MS and that’s the story everyone’s afraid of.