Google Search Appliance and using the Google Logo
– posted October 11th, 2006 by Laurence Veale No comments
To use the Google logo or not? Most of our clients ask us this question when implementing the Google Search Appliance or it’s little brother, the Google Mini. And what do we tell them?
A lot of the apprehension is from the fear of diluting your own brand. But in fact, you can actually reinforce it by leverging on the trust people feel for Google’s brand.
User testing and internal site search
I’ll give you an example. Through a series user testing sessions we conducted, we noticed a number of people not using search when they were clearly lost.
In Jared Spool’s language, they had lost the scent of information, yet they didn’t resort to search. Why not?
In all cases, the search was positioned prominently in the top right of the screen, it looked exactly like the search interface on any search engine, nice long search box with a large button clearly labelled “Search”. Had our participants simply missed it?
We asked the users why they hadn’t used search. Again, in all cases, their explanations were really similar.
They had all seen the search box, but didn’t use it because they didn’t trust that their search would deliver results. When asked to elaborate on why they didn’t trust the search before they had even seen results, the answers, again, were very similar: on any other internal site search the search results were never accurate.
Users had low expectations of site search from previous experience
Due to their previous experiences with site search, they had very low expectations of all consequent searches. So much so, they didn’t bother using it. That’s something we really didn’t expect to find.
When asked if they ever used search, they responded, almost in unison, that they used Google for everything. So there is an inherent trust that Google.com will deliver accurate results in sub-second response times.
Leveraging the Google brand to engender trust in your users
So if you’ve just invested in the Google Search Appliance there’s a good case for using the Google logo to transfer trust from Google.com to search on your site and intranet.
Google Search Appliance examples
The following organisations have used the Google logo on their site search results. You can bet it’s for good reason.
Camden Council
Cisco
Reader’s Digest
Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson don’t use the Google logo explicitly. However, at the footer of their search results, they display the subtle text, “Powered by Google”.
National Semiconductor
The following quote from a success stories page on the google enterprise site says it best:
The number of searches performed each day has more than doubled, Our employees are inspired to use our intranet search when they hear it’s powered by Google. They love Google because it helps them to be more productive.
More information
A great resource for tips on how to get more from your Google Search Appliance is the Google Enterprise blog
Digg this post Submit to del.icio.us Submit to technorati
Categories Design, Enterprise Search, Search Engine Optimisation, Technology
