Yahoo beats Google for customer satisfaction
David Rosam on Aug 15 2007 at 8:27 pm | Filed under: Google, Search engines, Yahoo
Search Engine Journal reports that Yahoo Tops Google in Customer Satisfaction Ranking. The data comes from ACSI (The American Customer Satisfaction Index), whose Q2 2007 ACSI Scores show Yahoo up 3.9% to 79% satisfaction and Google down 3.7% to 78% satisfaction.
SEJ suggests the following as drivers for the results:
What could have influenced the rise in customer satisfaction with Yahoo (opinion)?
* Implementation of targeted Yahoo Shortcuts
* Serving Yahoo Answers in Selected Results
* Consolidation of various services into one package (Yahoo Photos/Flickr)
* Cutting back on fluffy Weather or News shortcuts where they are not needed
* Better ad targeting via Yahoo Search Marketing Panama
* Better Image Search with live Flickr photosWhy may have customer satisfaction at Google fallen (opinion)?
* Confusing Google Universal Results inserting video & news into content
* Changing of AdWords Background Colors
* Outdated homepage
* Personalized search results
* Dropping of Froogle
I wonder if we’re seeing some simple anti-Google backlash, too, as it dominates the Web.
It’ll be interesting to see if the commonly-perceived failing Yahoo maintains its challenge to Google in other surveys in the coming months.
A lot of this may center around the seeming lack of relevance typical of some Google search results these days. Starting this year, I have noticed that some results do not show any of the search terms I typed. Looking at the cached version also reveals no occurrence of these terms either. Backlinks show no link anchor text that could explain this phenomenon. It is definitely the exception rather than the rule, but if this happens enough Google could certainly lose market share over time.
It seems obvious that if I’m searching Google for a particular query, then the pages that I am served really ought to contain SOME mention of what I am searching for!
Also whatever is happening with high-volume one-word results is really screwy - I though it was a hand-ban situation but it seems that a lot of these results rotate through a few highly mediocre sites each week. Creepy.
This seems like an interesting blog - subscribed!
Thanks for your comments strza
Do you find any of the other search engines give you better (more satisfactory) results?
Good question - since I’m in SEO I hardly ever use anything besides Google. I notice this happening a lot when I search for various Linux error messages.
I ought to make it a point to at least give Yahoo a chance.
I use Google most of the time for searches, too. But where I do use Yahoo is as part of competitor research when working for clients - you never know when Google has sandboxed something you should know about