In recent weeks we’ve started to see a lot more ‘pro-Google’ content online, from videos about Google’s history, to videos about Chrome OS – but now we’re starting to see a whole new set of videos from Google that might just represent a significant moment in their development as a business. This week Google have released to the world ‘Search Stories’, a series of videos focusing around the idea that “the best search results don’t show up on a search engine, they show up in somebody’s life”.
Could this be the start of Google reacting to their ‘noisy neighbours’? MSN had a big ATL campaign in the US to support the launch of Bing and that campaign is planned to roll out in the UK in Q1 2010, while Yahoo have been all over my television lately.
MSN choose the catchphrase “Search Overload”, suggesting perhaps that Google was returning too many irrelevant resuts, while Yahoo were promoting themselves as a portal more so than a search engine (”The internet is under new control – yours”). Google’s choice of caption for this series of videos, “Search On”, seems to say “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with Google search – it’s part of your life”
Admittedly Google don’t seem to be ‘overly’ promoting these videos as of yet, but in look and messaging these very much feel like the start of a branding push by Google and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the ‘Search On’ concept mirrored out across future communications.
I’ve embedded one of the videos below and you can see the rest on http://www.youtube.com/searchstories
What do you think? Is this the start of something bigger for Google? Do they even need to respond to Bing and Yahoo’s recent pushes?
I’ve said it in previous posts and I’ll say it again – 2010 is going to be very interesting in the battle for search supremacy.
