Google Gains Ground On Yahoo
- by Erik Sass @eriksass1, August 15, 2006
The ACSI report--the result of collaboration between the University of Michigan, the American Society for Quality, CFI Group, and research firm ForeSee Results--has Google on top with a satisfaction rating of 81 out of 100, followed by Yahoo at 76 and MSN and AOL at 74 each--representing a 1 point drop for Google and a 5-point drop for Yahoo from last year's study.
These findings indicate a major shakeup of the search market, said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee. "Last year Google was clearly number one, Yahoo was solidly in second place, and the others were fighting for third. Now, Google is still clearly number one, but Yahoo has slipped further back into the pack and is fighting with the others for second place."
Asked what is behind Yahoo's slip in satisfaction ratings, Freed pointed to the company's re-launch of its home page in May. "The re-launch of the site wasn't actually an improvement from the user experience perspective," Freed said, adding that consumers think the large variety of functions available from the home page have left the site "too busy." "At a certain point, there's too much choice," Freed said.
Google, by contrast, has kept its site "clean and simple," Freed said. But this stripped-down approach has its own drawbacks for Google--for example, making it difficult to promote Google's new services including e-mail, calendar, mapping, chat, and home page personalization. "It's sort of the opposite problem from Yahoo," Freed said. "Google has added an enormous number of capabilities of late, but they don't have a market share lead in any of them, because they haven't taken advantage of Google functionality to let people know." According to Freed, Google has only recently begun promoting its new services more aggressively, but their success remains to be seen.
