I had my dad start using Ask Jeeves some time back in the 90's. Altavista had gone south and the online search space was very fluid, I thought that Ask was pretty decent, and Jeeves was kind of cool back then. I was surprised when visiting him a few months back to see the site come up as his home page, he said it always did what he wanted so he never changed.
It sounds like his dad never tried Google, thus there was nothing to "stick".
I think the lesson here is that while the search engine switching cost is $0, people are creatures of habit and may continue using something long past its expiration date if it is returning expected results.
What we see from this case is also why IE has such a huge market share. Less computer literate people will start using whatever some more experienced entity tells them to, and will keep using it until/unless they are forcibly switched to a new platform.
They say "Google isn't sticky" because they think that search engines aren't sticky (they just happen to be doing the analysis relative to Google); flatline's father "sticking" with Ask is a counterexample of a search engine being sticky.
GP post was using 'Google' to mean 'search', as in 'search isn't sticky'. But if someone has stuck with Ask for a decade out of habit -- that's a small example otherwise.
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I had my dad start using Ask Jeeves some time back in the 90's. Altavista had gone south and the online search space was very fluid, I thought that Ask was pretty decent, and Jeeves was kind of cool back then. I was surprised when visiting him a few months back to see the site come up as his home page, he said it always did what he wanted so he never changed.
They say Google isn't "sticky" but that's a good counter-example (albeit a small sample size).
How is that a counter-example?
It sounds like his dad never tried Google, thus there was nothing to "stick".
I think the lesson here is that while the search engine switching cost is $0, people are creatures of habit and may continue using something long past its expiration date if it is returning expected results.
What we see from this case is also why IE has such a huge market share. Less computer literate people will start using whatever some more experienced entity tells them to, and will keep using it until/unless they are forcibly switched to a new platform.
They say "Google isn't sticky" because they think that search engines aren't sticky (they just happen to be doing the analysis relative to Google); flatline's father "sticking" with Ask is a counterexample of a search engine being sticky.
GP post was using 'Google' to mean 'search', as in 'search isn't sticky'. But if someone has stuck with Ask for a decade out of habit -- that's a small example otherwise.