Loyal to None

It seems like everybody loves Google these days, but I just read an article on InternetRetailer.com that refers to a report from Forrester about cunsumers' lack of loyalty to any one search engine.

I guess some things never change. It's been talked about for a long time how fragile market share is in the search engine space. "The competitor is only a click away," is the oft-used phrase. Forrester's new research appears to reinforce that fact.

However, I found it interesting that 40% of online users said they are loyal to a single search engine, which I think is up from numbers in previous studies. Also, Google was rated as most effective for most information search tasks--and Yahoo and MSN were rated more effective for finding music or video content. AOL was rated least effective in all 11 search task categories, which is pretty humorous, especially since AOL's search is really just Google. What's up with that? It makes me wonder how accurate consumers' assessments of search engines really are. Like most things in marketing, I guess it's just a matter of perception...that, or maybe the people who were polled have never really used AOL for searching, they just "know" that AOL sucks so they gave them the lowest ratings.