Take for instance this study at the Pennsylvania State University.  They studied how important branding was with Search Engines.  While they don’t make any of their methodology available (therefore making it hard to really assess the strength of a study), I think there’s a great point.

Branding plays a *big* role in a great many things, and search engines are no exception.

Specifically, something marketing folk like to call “top of mind awareness”, or “top of mind recall”, but also how people think about, re-arrange and re-order their perceptions of things.  And in this case, its search engines.

The summary is that they took identical search engine results and ascribed the results to four different search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, and some in-house search engine.  When asked which results were the best, its absolutely no surprise that people favoured the ones labeled “Google” and “Yahoo” even though the search results were identical.

And I think this highlights the absolute futility in trying to unseat Google or even Yahoo as a search engine.

Even if your results *are* better, you are fighting a battle of perceptions and reputation.  Its not just an issue of building a better mouse trap.  The “install” base for Google / Yahoo is just overwhelming, and sad to say — they got there first.  If you need a better example of a mediocre products trumping better ones, business history is littered with them.  Look no further  than Microsoft and Apple.  The qwerty keyboard.  Man, it goes on.

Now, that’s not to say that you can’t make a good living or a good company with an average search engine.  Don Dodge’s math pegs 1% of the search market as being worth about a billion dollars.  My math isn’t all that great, but even if he’s wrong by a factor of ten … that’s still 100 million dollars.

If you’re willing to settle for being a 1% company, then that’s fine.  I hope that’s fine with Ask.com, for example or Mahalo.  But unless there is a seismic shift in perceptions, probably both of the search industry at large *and* your company,  you’ll never unseat Google.  That is to say, there would need to be the public perception (fomented by you — or not) that there is something seriously wrong with Google, COUPLED with the perception that your search engine is the answer.

If you can’t do both of these things, then be happy with your share of the search engine pie.  Even small pieces are worth a lot of cash.

Don’t get me wrong: making some strategic moves makes sense if you’re content to be the third fiddle (or fourth, or fifth) to Google’s chief fiddler (or, for the comic book geeks out there, let’s say Firelord, to Google’s Galactus). I think it would be smart to pay Firefox, for example, to make Ask.com its default search. Or, for that matter, starting a price war when it comes to contextual advertising.

Heck, as a blogger and publisher I would *welcome* the latter.

But let’s be honest here.

Google owns one thing that Ask will never have.

Or, something that Yahoo will never reclaim.

Or, that Microsoft will never be able to buy.

And that’s the “mindshare” of Internet users world wide for what “Search” means. Heck, for the minds of some people, Google *IS* the Internet. And let’s not get into its forays into web applications, dark fibre, data centers and the like.

When most people think “Search”, or what to query anything, they think of Google. And now that Google’s been in that position for so many years, it will take more than strategic maneuverings, no matter how slick, subtle, or expensive they might be, to change that.

The kinds of changes that Ask.com is trying to implement are tactical at best, but even the smartest strategic maneuverings would never do more than advertise and bring attention to what Ask.com is — and that is a Search Engine like Google.com

Leapfrogging over Google would take some massive kind of shift in what Search means, something hugely disruptive and innovative. Is *that* what’s going on at Ask.com? Maybe it is, but I haven’t heard anything about it. I mean, sure they’re changing algorithms, apparently.

Whoop-de-frackin’-doo.

Let’s say you could prove that Ask.com is a better search tool than Google, well, what then?

It still wouldn’t be good enough. Business history is littered with examples of poorer technologies that still took and never relinquished the lead even when better products or technologies existed. The Qwerty keyboard. Microsoft.

I could go on.

Do I think Ask.com could topple Google? Of course not. Could it improve its share of the search engine market with aggressive marketing and wiley strategic partnerships? Sure. But how much of the pie are they eventually going to get? And are they going to be happy with that tiny sliver of a slice? Will it be a curve of decreasing marketing returns?

But will investors ever be happy being the runty animal in the search engine family?

My feeling is probably no.

Will Ask.com have the intestinal fortitude to introduce something really game changing rather than settling for throwing marketing cash at a problem that money can’t solve? (Because let’s face it — if money *COULD* solve it, Microsoft would have already done it)

Again — my feeling is probably not.

But you know what? It could. So why doesn’t it?