Consumers Unsatisfied with Portals

According to the most recent study conducted by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, customers in the U.S. are becoming less satisfied with major portals and search engines, Google included.

The ACSI categorized Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN as portals, while it classified Google and Ask.com as search engines. About 70,000 consumers were interviewed for the study, and more than 200 e-business companies in 45 industries and 10 economic sectors were rated in terms of customer satisfaction.

Google scored the highest out of all the portals/search engines with 81 of a possible 100 points, though this was a 1.2% decline from last year’s 82. President and CEO of ForeSee Results (which provides commentary for ACSI’s e-commerce and e-business measurements, and also sponsors them), Larry Freed, called this a “minor decrease.”

Yahoo!’s score dropped 5% from last year’s 80 to 76 points this year. “The sharp decline in Yahoo’s customer satisfaction score this year seems to show that Yahoo may be offering more options than its users need, or at the very least throwing them too many options at once,” said the report.

AOL was the only major portal/search engine that saw its score increase. The Time Warner segment’s score jumped 4.2% from 71 points last year to 74 points this year. This shows that despite losing 2.8 million members in 2005, the changes to AOL.com have been received positively, and that “the fringe folks are leaving,” said Freed.

Ask.com’s score declined 1.4% from 72 to 71 points. This was the first time since ACSI began keeping track of Ask.com that the search engine fell below AOL in terms of its customer satisfaction score. Freed attributes this to the search engine’s transition from Ask Jeeves to Ask.com. “Site scores go down for a short period as site users get used to the new design, and then if the design has been done well, scores go up again,” the study indicated.

MSN saw its score drop 1.3% to 74, which is one point less than last year’s score of 75 points. The study suggests that this slight decline is nothing extraordinary, since the portal lacks a “distinct personality or clear advantage.”

Freed attributes the overall downward trend to the absence of any major advances. “There’s nothing new, there’s not a lot of innovation going on. That is, I think, the downward pressure,” he said.

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