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Yahoo Edges out Google in Customer Satisfaction
athloi writes "The University of Michigan's American Consumer Satisfaction Index shows some significant shifts this year in consumer satisfaction among several major online players: Google, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL. For one, Google no longer holds first place. 'The ACSI report notes that Yahoo's jump into first place was a 4 percent increase over its score from last year, while Google saw a 4 percent decrease during the same time period. ACSI says that to the untrained eye, Google's home page today looks almost identical to the way it looked years ago. This is where Google's simplicity is apparently hurting it in the long-term, as new users just aren't seeing Google's new offerings--such as increased storage options, additions to Google Maps, and tweaks to Google Image Search--right in front of their faces like they do with other sites.'"
Yeah, I have no gripes with Yahoo, they always return my ping requests within milliseconds.
Who exactly takes these surveys? Isn't it largely midwestern housewives who have time to answer the phone during the day, and are happy just to have someone to talk to?
Google seems to be the best with developers and coming up with new technologies. I still think they rule.
Plus they don't blow money on advertising spots.
Has anyone ever seen an ad for Google?
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
this is because the people who stuck with Yahoo we're fanbois while new users gravitated to Google and didn't like it as much as fanbois loved Yahoo?
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
At least with google maps.
..... done. Those whole world is there.
Take a look at yahoo maps. It's
Now when I want to see if google maps added any countries, I have to go to a BLOGSPOT blog. (http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/)
They're waaaayy too slow actually actually finalize a product. Check out the labs. (labs.google.com).
What....*what* is still beta???
Perhaps the best move is to have some Google Blog entries on the main page. If done tactfully, they could easily inform users of new updates without becoming as bloated as Yahoo has.
I like the wild stab at blaming Google's "simplistic" homepage as being the cause of their lack of customer satisfaction. The quick-to-load, non-headache inducing simple Google homepage is one of the reasons that drew me in to Google, and is one of the reasons that keeps me coming back. But maybe I'm just a geek that way and other people want their homepages to look like a neon strip mall.
I'm sure that far more people still use Google, and most of those people would be even less satisfied with Yahoo!.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
The simplicity of their site and the fact that Google *hasn't* changed their front page to include the usual bloat is exactly what keeps some of us using it. I know that more users equals more money and maybe the masses want more crap on the main page (maybe they don't) but sometimes it may be better to worry about quality more than quantity. That's one of the things that has made Google so strong over the years. They haven't (yet) sacrificed their quality just to be mainstream and I think that has worked very well for them so far. The day that Google loses their simplicity on the main search page is the day I find an alternative.
I always found it annoying when site's basic design is continually changing, especially since it usually accumulates into a cluster fuck of links, pictures, and menus. And yet you still can't find what you're looking for on the dam things.
Personally I enjoy my relatively simple personal Google homepage. But that might just be me.
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
What are their metrics for customer satisfaction? Is it really quantitative or are they applying numbers to qualitative metrics just to get numbers?
I think my BS meter is going off. At least it has metrics that are rock solid!
The game.
It's not their simplicity that's hurting them, it's that they've failed to follow through on their success. The search engine was an amazing tool, and GMail was absolutely wonderful. But after that they had quite a few missteps. Maps was initially less useful than, say, MapQuest due to poor directions. This was eventually improved upon, but now Google is fighting the first-impression syndrome. Similarly, Google Video failed to appeal to most users. Google eventually gave up and bought their competitor: YouTube. Which sent the message that Google Video was as much of a failure as everyone thought it was.
Then you've got increasing complaints about their AdSense and AdWords services. Various webmasters complaining that they were kicked out of the program for no discernible reason. AdWords advertisers who say that they're getting charged for links they didn't get. Etc.
It all adds up to an age old problem: It's hard to maintain the top position. All the eyeballs are focused on you, and if you don't deliver you're going to get heavily criticized for it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What are we "consuming" when we visit one of these sites? It seems like the advertisers are the consumers and we, the page-viewers and click-throughers, are the product...
My daughter discovered this infernal thing called iGoogle, something exactly like a yahoo portal customized from her google/gmail account. Every time she forgets to log out, I am presented with that garish thing. I have to go and reset it to "classic" interface. Dont know if it is a google project or someone trying to crash Google's party. Like that thing seenonslash.com trying to live on the reflected glory of slashdot.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I would be more apt to use Yahoo for some stuff on occasion, but just like MSN, entering that URL delivers an annoying array of flash ads and overbearing design.
who immediately opened a new tab and brought up yahoo.com to see a cluttered page (although less so than it used to be) and a Flash advertisement and sat there scratching my head with a "Huh?" look on my face?
Only speak when it improves the silence.
The comments here pretty much sums up user experience with Yahoo! lately:
n -tonight/
http://yodel.yahoo.com/2006/11/28/anything-good-o
Yahoo maps used to be great, but I like google these days, so haven't gone back to see how Yahoo is anymore. The biggest win for Google's mapping service is the fact that other sites can use their APIs and database (mapmyride.com for example). Yahoo's movie listings are still ok, but if they go down the road they went with yahoo TV, there will be a mass exodus for that service too.
Yahoo is dead (at least to this user) if google ever does TV and Movie listings with the same useful, unobtrusive interface that they use for their other stuff.
"ACSI says that to the untrained eye, Google's home page today looks almost identical to the way it looked years ago. This is where Google's simplicity is apparently hurting it in the long-term, as new users just aren't seeing Google's new offerings..."
Typical market survey.
1) Say, "Hey, I wonder if..."
1) Ask some questions and see some results.
2) Draw conclusions from the results which support your initial premise.
Is Google's market share dropping? Well if the numbers are correct then then answer is yes. The WHY of it is a matter of conjecture, though. I suspect that far more than being 'hurt by simplicity,' Google is suffering because their search engine is no longer much better than the others. Yahoo has improved, and at the same time, Google has degraded. Too many of the top results for any given search are ads for a product (especially from Amazon), or stupid metareview sites like nextag or buy.com, that everyone despises.
I generally use alltheweb.com as my main search engine, and google as a backup. If Google wanted to get my attention back 100%, then they should FIX THE SEARCH ENGINE, so that the results are as good as they once were. Even better, let me set (via a cookie) which sites I never ever ever ever ever want to see results from again.
They don't need a fancier website, they need to improve their core business offering. Of course, ACSI would rather come up with marketing reasons.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
True, the second one hasn't really changed much - only a few extra clicky's for new stuff they've added. However, the first one is changes all the time - namely due to content changes (news, etc.) - and is completely customizable for those with a Google Account (gmail, google calendar, etc.).
And every so often, the first one comes up when you simply type in "www.google.com", though it is usually the second. You can still flip between them using the link in the upper right hand corner just to the left of "Sign in" - click on "iGoogle" to go to the first one, and "Classic Home" to revert back.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
What Google needs is not to change its clean search engine, but just provide a new service, maybe text linked to from the search engine place... Called something like "Google Center" which is more of a portal, or at least news page. I know their blogs announcing stuff like Google Earth updates or whatever, but I don't think a blog is efficient enough in format. The page could collate news from different major areas (search, Google Earth, Gmail, ...) along with having a "Misc" section where you have links to stories announcing other more minor things.
Just some one stop place where people can actually get an overview of not just their services, but the news on their services.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I really like Google's page simplicity. Its the main reason I use them.
I hate pages that agregate all sorts of redundant stuff and advertising when you're just looking for a search page.
I only have tenative ties to yahoo through a few newsgroups that use Yahoo (ick, I know) but all... yes, pretty much all of the spam I receive in mail, in IMs, and in 'friends list adds' are all from Yahoo sources. I know it's not technically their fault, but sometimes it's ridiculous. I fire up Pidgin and there's 5 messages, and then two or three newsgroups a week get hit with spam messages. I can pretty much tell because all of it has one handle I only used for a yahoo group. Frankly, I wish Yahoo would spend more time dealing with the garbage that's ruining their Groups instead of tinkering with their front page every week.
Google Video failed to appeal to most users. Google eventually gave up and bought their competitor: YouTube. Which sent the message that Google Video was as much of a failure as everyone thought it was.
Well, the other issue was how they screwed people who had purchased content off Google video. I don't whether is just goes against their 'do no evil' mandate or whether its shear incompetence, either way it just highlights what can end up happening with DRMed content. At least with a DVD you are free from this.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I'm timing out. Also when I go to their finance.yahoo.com page. my.yahoo.com seems to still be working tho'.
I Googled it... ;-)
Google's home page today looks almost identical to the way it looked years ago
In my mind, that simplicity is a Good Thing(TM). When I want to search, I just want to enter a keyword; I don't want a bunch of crap I have no interest in presented to me.
I have been using both for years and don't really have any major problems, each has their stong suites. (But no real complaints.)
(ding down my Karma again, i think i just told the truth)
Try being a business customer and paying for directory inclusion, then want to cancel. Canceling via the site, removing for CC data from your profile, and sending a cancellation letter, still gets you an automatic renewal. So try to send an email that's on your Terms of Service, bounces... Try calling their various phone trees, no option for directory services. Try just hitting zero on the three phone numbers you can find, get transfered a half a dozen time sometimes to the same person. Get your credit card company to try can call with you? They get the same run around trying to talk to anyone from billing. Google it sometimes and see the dozens of stories similar to mine. So to summarize:
1) violate your own terms of service
2) provide no way to communicate
3) force credit card companies to chargeback
Priceless Customer Service
I used to be a loyal user of their mail for over 7 years. Then one day last year they decide to wipe out those 7 years worth of e-mail for no reason, despite the fact that I logged in every week. I tried to get a direct number to their customer service, but they were useless. Their web forms were equally useless. I have since then discontinued all services with them and their affiliates (including pulling the plug on my AT&T phone line.)
:-( Good riddance Yahoo!
Yahoo is useless, and I'll never ever go back. Gmail is infinitely better (and gets far less spam.) Too bad I can't ever get my lost e-mails back.
Ha, the "confirm you're not a script" image is "sinning". How fitting for such an evil company!
Maps was initially less useful than, say, MapQuest due to poor directions. This was eventually improved upon, but now Google is fighting the first-impression syndrome.
I think that might depend on your particular experience - for me, Maps was a godsend from day 1 because I've had nothing but trouble with Mapquest. Additionally, their UI blew Mapquest out of the water. Add in the satellite imagery, local search, customizeability, and I haven't used Mapquest in years.
Various webmasters complaining that they were kicked out of the program for no discernible reason.
Just like everybody in prison will tell you they were innocent. There's probably a handful of honest webmasters out there who really got screwed, but I think the vast majority were playing games. The problem with advertisers is probably more legitimate, but I've yet to hear a good solution to click fraud - Google is most certainly trying.
Google eventually gave up and bought their competitor: YouTube. Which sent the message that Google Video was as much of a failure as everyone thought it was.
Well...it did suck. ;) Google Video, for me, was their one total flop.
How can yahoo compete with Blackle... I know, I know, mod me into oblivion.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
You know, Yahoo offers a boatload of casual online games, which are very popular. They also offer Fantasy Sports games (Fantasy Football, Basketball etc.), which also have a loyal and enthusiastic following, which are all services that Google does not offer.
All those are huge online-time sinks and could give Yahoo an edge, especially when it comes to "average" internet users (coincidentally, Fantasy Football is the reason why Yahoo still has a place in my bookmarks bar...).
google is like a useful site and all, but until i can google
for a date on a sat night, i will continue to find female
satisfaction with yahoo tools.
thanks!
Like, every time I open FireFox or OperaMini.
Search:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fwTQKZ-j6Fk
Earth:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DletSFRKS7M
Search Appliance:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QQWn0kkWX8E
Maps:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ug_dIOE7x8Q
For instance, they bought Broadcast.com and instead of bringing us YouTube five years earlier in '99 they just let it rot. Now the domain name just forwards to www.yahoo.com. What the hell Yahoo? Broadcast was there first, you bought it and did NOTHING!
A small added benefit of Google's simplicity is that it doesn't send me into epileptic seizures.
And I'm not even epileptic.
Yahoo's main page may tell me about all the shiny new things they have going on but _I_DON'T_CARE_. I just want to run a search. A "What's new?" link would be plenty - for when I actually care, which is 1% of the time max.
I like Google for mail and searching but twice now in the last month their maps have showed me the address wrong. I put a zip code in with the address and it gives me a map a few miles North with a different zip code with no warning. Yahoo maps hasn't steered me wrong yet so I've given up on Google maps.
I have no problems with Yahoo, heck I keep getting e-mails that I won another lottery, man I'm going to be stinking rich lol
Google | Yahoo | Slashdot | ...
customers are its advertizers.
and, to repeat myself from long ago,
your eyeballs are the product.
As long as the customers are satisfied,
the money keeps flowing. Customer satisfaction
correlate with consumer satisfaction, yet the
coefficient of correlation might not be 1.
(Ponder if it is higher.)
I'm generally pretty satisfied with Google, but their search logic and interface has been slowly changing of lat and it's not always for the better...
.NET or C++ now seems to get a lot less erroneous at least on the web at large. A discussion group search qualified by .NET still seems to produce a lot of useless results, though now mainly because there are a lot of www.website.net URLs when some time ago it seemed completely unable to differentiate between NET and .NET
For example, you used to always be informed of how many articles are on a groups.google.com discussion thread, now you often just get the line with the date & author but no article count-- which for a while I assumed meant there was only 1, but I've since realized that's not the case-- which is *really* annoying-- I've long wished you could filter on thread count >1, but now not only you can't do that but you actually have to click on a thread to find out if there's followups associated or not.
Also, groups search sometimes doesn't do that great of a job screening by groupname anymore-- the last couple of days I had the occasion to do a lot of searching in the *.delphi.* group and often would get a lot of hits in completely unrelated groups that didn't have delphi in the name (or I would think, be cross-posted either)-- I tried a few just now and can't reproduce so it may have been a transient glitch. I had also found that searching for things in a group with a group filter of *delphi* vs *.delphi.* made more of a difference than I would have expected, but when I was seeing the irrelevant hits neither method would filter them out very well.
And Google's language screening has always been pretty terrible-- I'll get a bunch of hits in Deutsch or something & go back and switch to English-only and end up with many of the same German-language hits.
Their symbol searching has gotten a little better though-- searching for
I just hope they don't do away with the "Google Classic" interface-- that is the main thing that I use them for and like that I don't have to think about it-- I do know about many of their other services though and use gmail, bookmarks and several other of their features. Those I don't mind as much if they are a little more cluttered-- as long as fundamental search is not cluttered.
Amazon for example, has been sticking motion trailers on their front page now and often sticking stuff in front of my face I don't want to see-- to the point I'm considering adding a rule or two to my HTTP filter to remove some of their excess junk.
I've repeatedly had bad experiences with Yahoo, both years ago and recently. In one case I couldn't change some of my settings because I put in the wrong birth-date and they told me there was no way to correct it. Later on, one Yahoo service told me my credit card expired, but another said it was okay. The expired one wouldn't let me update it because of the conflict between the two. If it wasn't for the problems of getting a new URL, I would have abandoned them.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm ready to switch search engines now. It's getting harder every day to actually use Google's search to find useful results. People are continuously attempting to SEO their ebusinesses onto the front page of Google. So rather than returning useful resources I basically get advertisements in the search results. Add on the side ads and sometimes the ads that appear at the top and I begin to wonder why I even tried it in the first place. Unfortunately I haven't seen a compelling alternative and I think even if one did show up, Google would just buy them out.
I read a better article about this, though I can't find it right now. According to the maker of the survey all numbers are +/- 2 points. I.e. the difference between Yahoo and Google is NOT statistically significant.
Customers are people who pay for stuff. As far as I can tell, for Google that's corporate users of Google Apps, and advertisers. People who use Google for web searches and gmail are not "customers".
still has tons of stuff I don't care about. Stock information? Don't own any, and if I did I'd go to stock sites to check that out. News? Not interested - I just want to search the web.
Google technical support is awful. Go to any of their support forums (which is the only place for support), and you'll see tons and tons of 1-post subjects asking for help with something or reporting a bug. They all have 1 post because people from Google rarely respond to any of them. And no, you can't email them when their product hoses your machine, as they only do support on the discussion groups, where you can add your problem to the hundreds of other unanswered problems that others have and pray that they will respond.
You don't believe me: Google Reader Bug Support Group (that group is a couple of weeks old only, but you can already see that they ignore most of the posts; in a month or two, it will be as bad as the following group), and Google Firefox Extensions Support (most of the ones in there that have more than 1 post are just other users commiserating with how awful the support is and wondering if anybody from Google even reads the group anymore, and you can find tons and tons of angry users who have lost data or had other terrible things occur and cannot even get anybody from Google to even acknowledge that they read the bug report).
I used to think I wanted to work for Google, but my recent experience with products of theirs apart from search has been so awful that I doubt they really care about quality anymore. Rather than fix bugs, they just keep pushing more shiny new and bug-ridden products out the door.
> Yahoo Edges out Google in Customer Satisfaction
v estigate-yahoo-involvement-china/story.aspx?guid=% 7B1286B45B-AE3F-426B-B832-1F5E35C677D0%7Di led_jou.html
Of course. The Chinese Government is extremely satisfied with Yahoo. Unfortunately for Yahoo, Congress has just announced they're going to investigate their compliancy with the Chinese Government. Treason is still a crime, Jerry Wang.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/congress-in
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/31/yahoo_and_ja
TFA wasn't quite clear.. are they saying that Yahoo! users like Yahoo! slightly more than Google users like Google?
If so ... it's interesting, but it doesn't translate to "Yahoo! is better than Google".
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Yahoo beats out google in news for sure, and is pretty close in most else.
It's about time a poll was taken of regular folks, that will not be ashamed, or feel embarrassed if somebody were to discover that they used Yahoo! instead of Google. The great courage of Yahoo! users, who must put up with a few, seemingly religious, zealots that say, "come to my church, I mean search engine," should be commended rather than denigrated.
I could list many of Yahoo!'s features that most Internet users love and use everyday, but I have to close out a bug, and wipe another google bug off my boot..disk. Hey, how about those Yahoo! Live Sets gigs?
I just want to run a search.
I assume search.yahoo.com was created for folks like you.It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
People using google/yahoo/other search engine are not their customers. Their customers are the people/companies that pay for advertising. The users are just that, lusers. unless they are paying for upgraded services, not sure if google offers that.
Google does not know how to produce mature applications.
There is a lot more maturity in some of the more "mundane" applications than you will ever realize. But keep in mind that some products are fairly young when compared to desktop stuff. And with a "release early, release often" sort of schedule, you get a good, growing trend toward a more polished product. Or maybe you'd rather everything sits under wraps until it's 100% done? Not sure anything would ever get released. I've seen very few software projects that were 100% done...
They only hire brilliant people (or people who are good at passing themselves as brilliant; and yes I do have specific individuals in mind) and they let people work pretty much without supervision.
Google hires smart people, yes; some I'd argue qualify as "brilliant". But I fail to see the correlation between intelligence and failing to produce a mature application -- or how intelligence could in any way be bad for an engineering company. What are you really trying to say? Because you sound bitter.
No, they don't let you work without supervision. You pulled that one right out of your ass. I could go on with this, but suffice to say that there are targets and goals and deliverables that need to be met. That includes bug fixes, BTW.
Plus, they have a rule that all developers must spend a fixed percentage of time on unassigned projects!
That's complete nonsense. First off, nobody "has" to do it. Some folks have a plan for some new widget, some folks pitch in on other things, some folks just hunker down and do their thing. Nobody's come by and forced a 20% project on anyone yet. Second, if you do want to work on something else it's never, ever, never, "unassigned". You just can't stamp your tiny feet and say "I'm spending every Thursday on Project X, and that's the final word!" That's just silly.
So basically, their developers never have to do anything they don't really want to do.
Dude, put down the pipe. Seriously. Do you honestly believe that's true? Do you really expect anyone else to believe that?
I've worked in organizations that fostered this kind of working environment (though usually not intentionally)
Somehow, I very highly doubt you've ever been in anything even remotely resembling the work environment at Google.
and here's what happens: developers spend all their time finding intellectually challenging work to do, and just ignore all the boring stuff. So you get lots of kewl new features, but nobody's squashing bugs or polishing the GUI, or doing any of the other boring chores you need to polish the rough edges off a product.
No, they don't spend all their time on woolgathering and research stuff. Yeah, hopefully your normal work is a challenge, but if not, then that's what 20% is for, or you move to a new group or something. Why would a company spend all that time and money to hire all those smart people only to have them sit there spinning their wheels with a choice of either working on their own stuff or being unhappy? What would those teams look like? I mean, think about it: you're making no sense whatsoever.
There are in fact lots of boring chores being done. And there are lots of bugs being fixed.
I don't know what sort of axe you have to grind (didn't make it past a phone screen or something?), but if you get your facts straight you'll find people more likely to come around to your point of view. If you don't like Google, fine: it's cool that you have choices. And so make your point with facts and reasoned arguments, and then offer alternatives. Just making stuff up isn't a good way to convince anyone of anything.
The worst Customer experience I've had in a while was with Yahoo.
/sigh
My account was Hacked, and with the several attempts I made to work with Yahoo to regain control of my account they absolutely refused to help me regain that account.
I was shocked and amazed at the flippant attitude they had towards me, especially when I notified them almost immediately after the account was hacked.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
You can improve customer satisfaction simply by driving unsatisfied customers away from your business.
Suppose I run a business that delivers a poor quality service, but some of my customers are happy enough even with poor quality. They will stick around and be satisfied. Unsatisfied customers will go elsewhere. If I can somehow prevent my business from getting any new customers, my customer satisfaction will approach 100% as time goes by.
In fact, customer satisfaction will always tend towards 100% unless you do at least one of two things:
1. Take on more customers. (most businesses do this and a percentage of the new customers will be unsatisfied)
2. Decrease the quality of your service. (pissing off customers who were previously satisfied)
The first three are ads that Google also paid for to reinforce their relevance. The Dell search appliance is a prime example of co-branding. The concept has been around for quite some time.
All this survey shows is that of the 100 remaining Yahoo users, 50 of them weren't getting what they wanted from Yahoo, so they switched to Google. The 50 remaining Yahoo users still haven't heard of Google, so they still think Yahoo is the best thing since sliced bread*.
*Of course, I am assuming that satisfaction surveys only apply to people who actually use the service.
Half the time i find out about google things by accident. Like google pushing out google desktop for linux i found out from slashdot i think?
I often wonder what I'm missing on google cause things come out that you just never seem to know about.
google gmail still has no alphabetical sorting!