Google has come out on top in a recent customer satisfaction research project.
The search engine scored 83 out of 100 for customer satisfaction in the American Customer Satisfaction Index's latest E-Business report survey of over 70,000 US-based respondents.
Bing came in a close second with 82. However, Ask.com also achieved a score of 80, which was regarded as the cut off point for a search engine to rank as ‘excellent’ in the study. AOL, AltaVista, MSN and Yahoo! didn’t make the cut.
But in spite of the fact that Google topped the rankings, it was actually Bing that showed the greatest level of improvement over the course of the year. Google saw a four per cent increase in customer satisfaction over the past 12 months, but Bing topped this with an increase of seven per cent. Furthermore, the Microsoft firm now makes up roughly 17 per cent of the search engine market, representing a significant increase from nine per cent last year.
Larry Freed, president and chief executive for ForeSee Results – an analytics firm which also worked on the study – commented: “While Google+ is the challenger to Facebook’s established dominance in the social media sphere, in the search engine wars, Google is king and Bing is hoping to be a contender.
“Last year, Google’s customer satisfaction score was three points higher than Bing’s. This year, that gap narrows to one point. Bing is showing it can challenge Google in terms of revenue, market share, and the customer experience.”
The update of search engine distribution comes as Google has implemented a number of changes to its online news service. According to revelations in the company blog, the US edition of Google News will now award users badges depending on how much news they consume. If successful, the service is expected to be rolled out to a number of different countries.
Companies with online news feeds might want to keep an eye on the service to see how the developments could affect their search marketing techniques, specially since there is a strong chance that the badges and news articles can be shared through Google+.
The search engine has also announced an update to its news service, which will see science and technology split into 2 distinct sections. Google employee Natasha Mohanty explained on the blog: “We are happy to report that we have now done this for all English editions, with more languages coming soon
“We also combined some personalisation settings from the ‘News for you’ and News Settings menu into 1 handy sidebar at the top right corner of the home page, so you can easily tell us what you want to read on your Google News.”
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