Well, that’s what the American Consumer Satisfaction Index shows, anyways. The Index compares customer satisfaction among companies and online businesses. Overall, it seems that customers are just as satisfied with Google this year as they were last year.
In fact, all the major search engines have improved in rankings in this quarter, compared to the same quarter last year.
Google was, as usual, on top, with a massive 86 percent consumer satisfaction rating. The other search engines had to settle for a 78 percent satisfaction rating. Yahoo’s rating was lower, at 77 percent, and Microsoft’s even lower at 75 percent.
The rankings, which have been conducted since 2000, all major search engines have improved their rankings over time, with the exception of Ask.com and AOL. Indeed, in second place in the rankings after Google is “all others” (search engines, that is), with whom satisfaction has increased 2.6 percent from last year.
It should be kept in mind that the survey was conducted before the announcement of either Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, or its new partnership with Yahoo.
Google remains at the top of the pack for both the quantity and the quality of searches made. However, Bing is gaining ground in terms of search quantity.
Online search engines fared quite well as an industry, with an 83 percent consumer satisfaction rate (almost as high as Google’s!). This was an increase of nearly four percent since last year.
Internet News and Information, as an industry, ranked significantly lower in consumer satisfaction, at 71.5 percent.
The rankings are well-deserved. Google works hard to keep its consumers happy, as its constant innovation would attest to. However, it will be very interesting to see next quarter’s results, when the consumer satisfaction after the announcement of Bing and the Micro-Hoo deal will be measured – the results may be less predictable now that everyone’s upping the ante.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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