Comments on: Google & The Triumph of White Space

By: Brian Prentice

Brian Prentice — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:33:51 +0000

Hi Mike – thanks for sharing your perspective. It’s a good point. It’s not that Google isn’t showing a whole bunch of advertising (and they’re certainly making more money at advertising then either AltaVista and Yahoo!) but you’re right that they at least extended their users the courtesy of conducting the search before doing so.

Hey wouldn’t it be nice if your movie theater acted the same way? instead of showing you all the annoying trailers before the movie they waited until the end!

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:08:45 +0000

The fact that Google provides an uncluttered UI rather than a “portal” is, to me, not just the face value of it. It says to me that their core business is providing the best possible search results for me – not trying to cross-sell me to advertisers or other content providers off their home page. That’s where altavista and then yahoo! went wrong – they took their search traffic for granted and concentrated on monetising it instead of keeping their search results relevant and useful.

So it’s not just the uncluttered UI – it’s what that uncluttered UI says about the company and its focus.

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By: Brian Prentice

Brian Prentice — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:47:28 +0000

Paul, thanks for your comments. Can you help me understand how you define “better” search results. As I mentioned, most people I speak to never make a comparison. But if they did, what criteria do you think they should use?

By: Brian Prentice: Google & The Triumph of White Space

Brian Prentice: Google & The Triumph of White Space — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:13:55 +0000

[...] Read more… Share: [...]

By: Paul Wallbank

Paul Wallbank — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:36:24 +0000

Interesting view, Brian. I’d argue the reason Google beats Yahoo! and MSN is simply because Google’s results are better.

It’s remarkable how much market share Google has taken despite many, if not most, systems coming factory set to other sites.