America Most Satisfied With Yahoo! for Search
|
Written By Drupad Sil | August 14, 2007 | Share This
|
|
The University of Michigan released its annual American Customer Satisfaction Index today, revealing that Yahoo! Search produces the most happy customers. This is the first time that Yahoo! has ranked above Google, which fell to second ahead of MSN (fourth), Ask (fifth), and AOL (sixth).
Here’s an explanation of how the ACSI works, from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land:
“The survey measures U.S. consumer satisfaction across a broad range of business and product categories including “e-business,” which covers search. The survey asks a statistically representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to a number of criteria, which produces an overall satisfaction score on a 100 point scale. The search/portal category has been rated since 2000. Until this year, Google has always lead the ASCI since the first year the index included it, in 2002.”
Looking at the 2007 data, search engines and portals as a whole garnered an average satisfaction rating of 75, down 2.6% from the previous year but up 19% since the category was first rated in 2000. Yahoo was awarded a 79, up about 4% from 2006 and 7% overall. Google was a point behind at 78, down 4% from last year and 2.5% overall. Ask had the largest jump in satisfaction year-over year, moving 5.6% to 75 points overall while AOL had the largest decline, falling 9.5% to land at 67 (barely beating out the IRS ranking).
The ASCI study is particularly interesting when correlated to search engine market share - if the ASCI in an indication of future customer behavior, Google’s drop to #2 may foreshadow a likewise drop in their dominance of the search market. Sterling examines these trends further in an interview with Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeseeResults, which interprets the result of the Michigan survey:
“I challenged Freed that there were numerous changes at Google (e.g., in Maps, Universal Search) but he countered that consumers were either not aware of these changes or they were too incremental to gain much notice… Regarding AOL’s decline, Freed attributed it largely to transition issues and the fact that AOL has been dogged by customer service problems surrounding cancellation of its dial-up ISP services…. MSN/Live Search was basically flat year-over-year, with ‘nothing to truly set MSN apart from the rest of the field,’ according to Freed.”
Google’s main problem is not a lack of great applications, but is rather a lack of attention from average internet users. Many of Google’s best features (increased storage options, additions to Google Maps, and changes to Google Image Search) are so seamlessly integrated that most people are hardly aware of their existence. As Tim Faulkner at Valleywag aptly concludes,
“It’s all well and good to try to dissect reasons for the gains and losses in customer satisfaction. But unlike, say, the car industry, where ACSI scores are closely watched and touted in marketing, it’s hard to discern any connection between ACSI’s measures of customer satisfaction and the Web companies’ market success. Web users choose search engines more by habit than anything else, and the Googling habit is well-ingrained. And advertisers make ad buys based on traffic and results, not customer satisfaction, making these results little more than a feather in the also-rans’ caps.”
Topics: Ask.com, Google, Search: News, Yahoo! |
Yahoo search results are heavy on products, where as Google search results are heavy on outdated criticism pieces. There’s usually a lot more customers who are actually looking for products and services on the internet than looking to read another negative criticism piece on what they are looking for.
If Yahoo continues on this path on giving top rankings to well built consumer websites, then consumers who continue to use Yahoo over Google will be an extremely happy bunch.
Well google and yahoo could have a lot of man power to work on things, I think it is those small niche search engines that will make a bigger difference in terms of user satisfaction down the road.
coolposting.com is a niche engine for discussion forum search, with an initial focus on hot deals and coupons.
With a good focus point, I believe it will win more satisfied users than those big guys.