Google wasn’t the first search engine. W3Catalog was.
Then Yahoo! became the first popular search engine.
But it was another 2 years before the founders of Google even started working on what would be Google.
So how did it overcome the behemoth that was Yahoo at the time?
Google realised that the key use case for search engines was discovering websites and the information on them.
So they simply made it easier to do this by focusing on the search bar - and nothing else.
This might sound obvious, but Yahoo at the time had buttons and links everywhere - as well as their own search bar.
Yahoo was too cluttered. Users had a degree of decision overload, which created friction and meant it couldn’t be used in the same subconscious way that Google can be.
Today many of us have a deeply ingrained habit of reaching for Google as soon as we have a question. You may not even realise it. This kind of habit is incredibly difficult for competition to break.
So Google won.
Google realised that the key use case for search engines was discovering websites and the information on them.
So they simply made it easier to do this by focusing on the search bar - and nothing else.
This might sound obvious, but Yahoo at the time had buttons and links everywhere - as well as their own search bar.
Yahoo was too cluttered. Users had a degree of decision overload, which created friction and meant it couldn’t be used in the same subconscious way that Google can be.
Today many of us have a deeply ingrained habit of reaching for Google as soon as we have a question. You may not even realise it. This kind of habit is incredibly difficult for competition to break.
So Google won.
Understand the main use cases for your product and completely focus in on one that none of the competition yet ‘owns’.
Everyone talks about the importance of focus. The founders of Google listened.
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