I was reading a post by Jim Kukral entitled, "Are You Thinking Like Google", in which he tries to explain why Google has become so successful. He offers up the same easy answer that so many other Internet analysts have offered up, which is that Google offers the most quality search results...

So why does Google win? Because Google is the world's biggest, and best, problem solver....

...The truth is, Google (and your business) has to solve problems for their (your) customers, the Internet searcher. If they (you) can't do that, they (you) lose customers. It's that black and white.

I disagree.

People use Google for viral reasons. People associate the word "Google" with quality. Whatever Google develops, people get excited. It's doesn't matter if Google pumps out shit, people will still want to dig their hands into it. Think Google Wave, which was a total disaster, yet it created so much buzz that people were clamoring to buy up every domain name with the word "wave" in it.

Google's products don't actually solve all your problems, they just make you believe it does.

You have to go back to 1998, back when search was dominated by Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, and All the Web. All of those sites billed themselves as search engines and web directories designed to help people find what they're looking for. Yet, in 1998 all the buzz was about "portals".

That is, those sites all wanted to be the end all, be all, destination for everything you needed to know, all on one webpage. Weather, news, sports, traffic, movies, shopping, everything, was all jam-packed on one single webpage.

It got to where you couldn't figure out where the search engine was. The search forms on these sites were tucked away into a corner, while all the other portal content took center stage. Instead of marketing their search engine, they tried to market their portal content.

So in 1999, Google debuts. And they offer up a ridiculously simple looking home page. No news, no weather, no horoscope, no shopping, no nothing, except a plain jane looking search form....



And this is still the same home page they offer up today.

When Google debuted, people saw it a total diversion from the other search engines. It looked so clean, so simple. It was totally unlike the clusterfucked checkerboard of content squeezed into every little square.

The media announced it as a "popularity search engine". That phrase is no longer used today, but back in the day that's what Google billed themselves as. And in that time, no one had ever heard of such an animal, and people were very intrigued.

I mean, I was very intrigued with it. I wanted to see how my websites showed up on Google. I typed in such search terms that should have yielded one of my websites as the top listing, but it did not, and delivered results that were totally irrelevant.

But the media, along with all the technology writers, all pounded out the message that Google was far more relevant, and consumers believed it. That hype is what launched the viral marketing that made Google what it is today.

The truth is that Google delivered up no more relevant results than Inktomi, which was the dominant search engine robot of the day. But what made Google successful was usability.

That is, it provided a very simple search form that people could understand, no portal content, no clutter, and it delivered results very quickly, and very easily understood. Google gave people simplicity, speed, and usability.

You have to keep in mind, that in 1999, the major search portals lost sight of what people really wanted. They assumed people wanted everything all presented to them on a single home page. But Google knew that people wanted to search, and they made it very easy and accessible to search. It helped that the media heralded them as a superior search engine.

But the fact is that the media didn't know shit at that time. All they had were the press releases, and they spewed out whatever quotations were handed to them. As it turned out, users didn't really care if Google was more relevant than Inktomi, all they knew is they now had a search engine they could easily get to, and use.

That's what made Google successful.

You can apply that same principle everywhere. For example a restaurant that serves up really great food will do poor business if its located in a bad area. But meanwhile, McDonald's will succeed because they focus so hard on marketing, accessibility, and convenience.

That should prove to you that a quality product is not what makes a business successful, it's all the other things.

Think about how that applies to your website. Just because you have a quality product or quality content, doesn't mean people are going to visit your website. YOu gotta do all the other things.  ✓