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.