User Happiness with Search Engines

Posted on February 23, 2008 by John Hunter

Awhile back I wrote about why I didn’t think the American Customer Satisfaction Index claim that Yahoo beat Google for customer satisfaction was evidence of a broken indicator. Well here is another indicator, but this time it puts Google clearly in 1st place, while Yahoo has been improving: Search Engines: Intense Competition Drives Better User Experiences

In the December 2007 Keynote study, Google makes a clean sweep of first place in all four key index rankings: Overall Customer Experience, Brand Impact, Future Usage Impact, and Customer Satisfaction. Yahoo! takes second place in every category, and Ask.com, MSN, and AOL follow in order. It is almost without precedent in Keynote studies of any industry that the rankings are so rigidly stratified (see Figure One). Typically, there will be some shuffling up or down in one or several of the indices. But in the past two studies, the competitors finished in rank order, straight across the board.

Google still has plenty of room to improve (for one example, their blog search is still very poor). And Yahoo is better than many people realize. But I think Google is still clearly better from my experience and looking at the available data (Google keeps gaining market share for one import piece of data).

Related: Search Share Data, Checking the ACSI – Meeting Like Google – Improve Google

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