Review: Search Me, Google’s success no surprise

You know that a brand has become truly, stratospherically successful when it enters the language as a generic term. As Neil Taylor points
out in Search Me , we talk about “hoovering” even if we’re using an Dyson, and now we speak of “googling” rather than “searching” the web. In the eight years since its inception, Google has become as familiar as Coke and McDonalds.

But most people feel a warmth towards Google that they don’t feel towards other large corporations. Google, says Taylor, embodies both the spirit of the BBC, with its public service ethos, and smoothie-maker Innocent Drinks, with its “fun” attitude and charismatic leaders.

So what has made Google so successful and why do we like it so much? These are the questions that brand consultant Taylor sets out to answer. He comes up with a variety of suggestions: its simplicity (the site consists of a single, inviting search box mostly surrounded by white space); its playfulness (the way the logo changes for special times of the year, for example); its carefully developed mythology about two hippyish, anti-establishment geek founders with their “Don’t be evil” motto. Oh, and the fact it’s so good.

Google is so superior to the search engines that came before it that most of us have forgotten that others ever existed. Type the word “information” into Google, and it will return six billion results in 0.11 seconds.

Google, Taylor cautions in this highly readable book, is showing signs of turning into an uncaring, mega-bucks corporation. But who cares about image when a product outclasses the opposition by a mile?

IN BRIEF
Search Me: The Surprising
Success of Google
Neil Taylor
167 pages, Cyan Books , £7.99
ISBN 1-904879-16-0

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