The Ingredients of Internet Success

Jan 18, 2007

Rand at SEOMoz refers to an article in Wired titled How Yahoo! Blew It. The article talks about Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel and about how Yahoo! constantly fumbled and got left behind in the search engine marketing game, by Google.

Rand rightly says that more than technology (although technology was at the crux of Google’s success), it was a combination of focus, a good and simple interface, viral marketing strategy and an early innovation that propelled Google ahead of Yahoo!

I think Yahoo’s main problem is that from the beginning people think it as a portal (at least I do) and this portal seems to be offering you everything under the sun.Search was just one of the things you could do there. So even for a small search, you’d have to be exposed to all those other links, banners and business offerings.

Google, on the other hand, mainly focused on search and became synonymous with the term to such an extent that when people are searching on the Internet, they are “googling”. What could be better for a search engine company? It’s like Xerox.

Regarding Google returning better results than any other search engine, I cannot personally vouch for it because most of the time I cannot find what I’m looking for :-). I think this aspect of Google is most often than not overhyped. It’s just that, Google moves ahead one step at a time and before moving on to the next step, the company perfects the current step.

Read the article in the Wired; it’s long, but quite interesting, and then do share your thoughts here.

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