Consumer Satisfaction Soars on Google

As reported on AdAge, Google leads in search satisfaction. Satisfaction increased a whopping 10.3 percent in this year’s American Consumer Satisfaction Index. It looks like Google’s efforts to improve the user experience through universal search and personalization have paid off. Other factors like being named ubiquitously in the news doesn’t hurt, either.

Other search engines remained stable or declined slightly. AOL gained (3 percent), Yahoo! and Ask dropped (2.5% and 1.3%, respectively), and MSN remained the same.
This year’s survey gives the highest satisfaction score to Google (86), with other portals trailing. Yahoo!’s score was 77; MSN’s, 75; Ask’s, 74 and AOL’s, 69.

Conducted by the University of Michigan and ForeSee, the American Consumer Satisfaction Index began their annual consumer satisfaction surveys 14 years ago.
The report notes its consumer satisfaction data correlates with market share data from Hitwise. In June, Google had 69.2 percent market share, up from June last year at 63.9 percent.

ForeSee President Larry Freed attributes the big gain to word of mouth about many of Google’s non search products. “On one hand, there’s a simple and basic interface to search,” said Freed. “But Google is also known as an innovative company and has other great apps that are slowly starting to gain market share. … As they launch these things, sometimes it takes a while until users get to know it.”