In the mean time, Google has a very clear friendly-face-with-the smartest-maths image. And they work hard to keep it. German car makers are notorious for tuning the sound of closings doors, to make them sound sturdy. Google is usually the snappiest, fastest loading site around. A few years ago they had a campaign for new employees with mathematical puzzles. Even if this had no effect on the quality of their new people, it definitely added to their slightly-funny-but-effective-geniuses image.

It might well be that the main importance of their gmail, and calendars and spreadsheets and other new stuff is to show that they are still smart and creative and whatever. It works for me that way: by spending time on other things, it feels to me that they must also be spending lots of time on improving their search engine.

The biggest difference between google and every other search site then, was how long it took pages to load. I didn’t actually switch so much as start using search regularly when I discovered google. At the time, I did not have a broadband connection and using other engines with slow page loads was excruciating. Before google, I avoided net searches. After google, it became the first thing I did when looking for information.

And that difference is still significant today. I just did a couple searches on yahoo (which is also an easily selectable option in my firefox search field without ever specifically installing it) and the same searches on google. The google page had much more data, and loaded in about 1/10 the time. the delay with the yahoo page was noticeable on my broadband connection. Textual data should not be noticeably delayed on a broadband connection. That’s just sad that in 2008, you can’t put a text page together that loads in less than 1 second.

This alone, even if the search results were marginally inferior, would keep me using google.
Google gets it. I’m using the internet to save time, not waste it.

Tom, definitely. Basic portal set-ups have a lot to do with what search engines people use. I’ve written about that for a long time.

I think what is happening is that Eszter and Varian are using different definitions of lock-in.

Yes, Tracy, absolutely. I am not thinking of it in the traditional technical sense and I should’ve definitely been more clear about that. I tried to clarify in one of the updates I added to the post.

By the way, regarding the clean look, while the start page may be clean, many people don’t even use that anymore as their access to Google (nor did they when they started using it as many started using it through other sites like Yahoo! as noted above). And when it comes to the results pages, the differences are not that huge anymore depending on the query, compare these two for the same search terms:
Google, Yahoo

Let’s not forget that search, in and of itself, is a money-loser. Google makes its money from advertising, and that while owning the search sector gives it powerful ways to bring advertisers and potential customers together, they’ll increasingly have to leverage things other than search to increase income from advertising—or find other ways of making money.

Varian is probably using the word “lock-in” in the sense of “Fix firmly in position, commit to something”. I’m not sure what sense Eszter is using it, but it appears to be something along the lines of “some web searchers are non-technical and get very comfortable with using Google”. If Eszter put this definition to Varian, Varian might very well agree that lock-in is possible for that definition of the word “lock-in”.

OT: I’d guess in 5 years or so someobody develops a self-sustaining open source competitor to Google that plows online ad revenue back into non-profit search development & hosting costs and then Google will find themselves in the same place as Yahoo—trying to get juice from an already squeezed orange.

For that type of user, how are you going to improve on a 20kB front page?

I’m sure I’m not the only person who uses Gmail and Google Calendar and whatnot who just automatically turns to Google to search because there is no reason not to. Most people don’t have the time and motivation to research alternative search engines if Google is giving them what they need and there is no significant benefit to going elsewhere.