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.'"

Comments

Actually...

[AKAImBatman]

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.

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.

Re:Spot on

[fm6]

I've said it many times before, but maybe this time people will stop and think before dismissing me as a troll.

Google does not know how to produce mature applications. 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. Plus, they have a rule that all developers must spend a fixed percentage of time on unassigned projects!

So basically, their developers never have to do anything they don't really want to do. I've worked in organizations that fostered this kind of working environment (though usually not intentionally) 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.

You mention Yahoo maps versus Google maps. For a long time, the technology behind Google maps was way superior to Yahoo's. In some ways, it still is. (Yahoo doesn't let you change your route with a simple drag.) But Yahoo has always been ahead of Google in the boring-but-necessary stuff, like providing simple drop-down lists of your memorized locations. Google didn't even have memorized locations for a long time, and when they finally implemented it, they used a weird keyword system that's a pain to use.

Google really needs to hire some relatively stupid plodders to go in and clean up stuff. Hey, I'm available!