Surely, there are two words which describe how the Google search engine has caught the imagination of the global village- simple and brilliant!

As valiant an effort Microsoft, Ask, and Yahoo! et al make at fighting back, they cannot beat Google’s winning formula.

An aspect of the Google method which I discovered recently as particularly striking was the way Google tests the market and refines its offering. In a ZDNet article ‘Joining Google’s journey through search’, author,  Stephen Shankland explains how Google uses a method called split A/B testing to measure exactly what changes it should make to its main search website — both to its home page search box and to the results it produces.

With the approach, Google shows different versions of the pages to users and measures how they respond.

For example, Mayer [Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience] said, the company wanted to find out how many search results to show users: the customary 10, or 20, 25, or 30? When asked directly, users said they’d like more results on a page, but testing showed otherwise.

Specifically, Google found that when the results increased to 30 per page, people searched 20 percent less overall, Mayer said. After much analysis of server logs, the company found it was because it took about twice as long to display the longer results list for the user, and speed matters.

“As Google gets faster, people search more, and as it gets slower, people search less,” she said.

The same effect happened with Google Maps. When the company trimmed the 120KB page size down by about 30 percent, the company started getting about 30 percent more map requests. “It was almost proportional. If you make a product faster, you get that back in terms of increased usage,” she said.

My impression was that in the past, vast amounts of time and money was spent with consultancies to determine this sort of information, with the results based on a probability of getting it right further dependent upon the size of test sample, and ‘wording of question asked’ to the respondent. Google’s sample size is enormous, can be tailored to country, region, culture, time of day… a plethora of variables. Results can be gathered and analysed in a very short space of time, and at very little cost. Okay, let me qualify that; without carefully planned control of the testing process, much advertising revenue could be lost by an ‘interior designer’ who is ’so last year’, but you see the point.

 What though is to become of the market research gurus as companies become more savvy at using the Internet to gain market response to their offerings? Is Google a unique case or will all companies move in this direction?

 Perhaps you have direct experience of this within your industry. I would be fascinated to hear your experiences. Please let me know.