Thousands of posts, news articles and analysis pieces have covered the central topic of battling Google's dominance in web search, but I've seen very few that have discussed what is, in my opinion, the most telling example of the search giant's dominance. The latest (made popular across Techmeme and many individual blogs) was this piece from C|Net's Don Reisinger:

In an interview last year with a Google representative on my podcast, the CNET Digital Home Podcast, I was told that the key to Google's success, and more importantly, a key component in its corporate culture, is its willingness and desire to get search users going to the destination site as quickly as possible. He said that Google recognizes itself as a "middleman" and getting users to its intended site quickly is paramount if it wants to be successful...

...Google's tallest barrier to entry in the search engine market is its advertising platform, which is the world's largest. By expanding its search, it's able to create a more enticing advertising platform through AdWords, AdSense, and its embeddable Google Search box.

I disagree. I don't think Google's dominance is owed to their willingness to "get users where they're going," their advertising platform, the quality of their search results, their partnership network or the billions in capital. It's the results of a simple test...

In this test, subjects were asked which search results they preferred for a wide variety of queries - long tail searches, top-of-mind searches, topics about which their emotions ranged from great passion to total agnosticism. They were shown two sets of search results and asked which they prefer.

Lots of tests like this have been run with all sorts of differentiations. In some, the brands are removed so users only see the links. Testers do this to get an idea of whether they can win from a pure "quality" standpoint. In others, the brands remain to get an unvarnished, more "real-world" view. And in one particular experiment - performed many times by many different organizations - the results are swapped across the brands to test whether brand loyalty and brand preference is stronger than qualitative analysis in consumers.

It's this last test that has the most intriguing results (at least, in my opinion). Because in virtually every instance where qualitative differences weren't glaringly obvious, Google was picked as the best "search engine" without regard for the results themselves:

Fundamentally, testers find (again and again) that the brand preference for Google outweighs the logical consideration of the search results quality. The problem is, we run up against a situation like this:

If Microsoft or Yahoo! or a start up search engine wants to take market share, they're going to have to think less like a technology company trying to build a better mousetrap and more like a brand trying to win mind share from a beloved competitor. How was it that Pepsi took share away from Coke? Or Toyota from Ford? I seem to recall that it took a lot longer than 10 years.

What do you think? Given this advantage, how can another search engine effectively compete?