Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Single-purpose tools seem better
Goal dilution
The effect has a name, goal dilution, and Ayelet Fishbach has written a paper on it.
Google's single focus
When Google arrived, nearly everyone else was trying to be a portal: a search function, plus the weather, sports scores, and bits of news. Google offered search and nothing else. If you are just a search engine, people assume you are a very, very good search engine, and Google was a technological success sitting on top of that psychological insight.
The television aisle
Shoppers show the same instinct in front of a row of flat-screen televisions. At the shabbier end sit the combined TV and DVD players, and nobody has any knowledge of their quality. People look at one and figure it's probably a bit of a poor telly and a bit rubbish as a DVD player, so they walk out of the shop with one of each.
How does goal dilution make products seem weaker?
The idea comes from a 2007 paper by Ying Zhang, Ayelet Fishbach, and Arie Kruglanski in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In their experiments, a means tied to several goals was judged less effective for any one of them than a means tied to a single goal. People seem to treat a tool's capacity as a fixed pool that gets divided among its jobs. The authors called their account the dilution model.
What did Google's homepage look like at launch?
Google launched in 1998 with a homepage holding little more than a logo and a search box. Rivals such as Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos filled theirs with news, email, shopping, and weather. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in September 1998 while they were PhD students at Stanford.
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