PennState's statement on the importance of brands in the search engine market. Users clearly preferred their favourite search engines, even when the results show exactly the same hits. Researchers presented faked result pages of various search engines on some given search terms to test persons and asked them to evaluate the quality of the hit list. Despite the exact results, participants of the study decided that Google and Yahoo outperformed all other search engines. Branding is being tied not just to product identification but also to product performance, says Jim Jansen, assistant professor and lead researcher. So newcomers, beware! (Source)