Love it or hate it, Google is loved by customers. Bing? No so much? And Yahoo, the love is pretty much gone. That’s according to 70,000 users who were surveyed as part of the 2014 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report.
Google received a ACSI score of 83 (out of 100), up from 77 a year ago, while Bing’s score was 73 (down from 76), and Yahoo’s score dropped to 71 (down from 76).
The score was calculated by looking at factors including:
- Site performance
- Freshness of content
- Variety of services and information
- Ease of using the site on different devices such as smartphones and tablets
- Ease of navigation
- Speed and reliability of video clips
- Amount of ads on site
ACSI said that search engines provide a better customer experience than any other e-business category they looked at (out of the 43 industries evaluated in the survey).
Search engines got top marks for site performance and mobile compatibility, and users rated the content as “far better than newspaper websites or social media sites,” according to the report. Though search ads were the “worst aspect of the user search experience,” search ads were viewed more positively than ads on social media or news/opinion websites, ACSI reported.
“A sharp increase in search engine advertising contributed to a drop in user satisfaction last year, but Google’s latest change to the way ads are labeled, along with its focus on the mobile user experience, may be steps in the right direction,” said ACSI Director David VanAmburg in a press statement. “Google has some of the most satisfied customers in all of ACSI, and given its enormous lead in search engines, it is unlikely that the competition is going to dislodge Google’s very loyal customer base.”
The ACSI also released scores on social media sites, based on the same user experience factors listed above. Pinterest was the top social site, with a score of 76, followed by Wikipedia (74); YouTube (73); Google+ (71); Twitter (69); LinkedIn (67); and Facebook (67).