Yahoo bests Google for once

Interesting. From ClickZ:

Yahoo rates higher in terms of customer satisfaction than Google. That's according to the annual e-business report released by ForeSee Results and the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

The e-business sector experienced a 1.7 percent dip to an overall score of 75.2 on ACSI's 100 point scale. The e-business category includes search engines, portals, news, and information sites.

Google's score sunk from 81 last year to 78 in 2007; a 3.7 percent decrease. In the same period, Yahoo raised its score from 76 to 79, up 6.8 percent.

"While Google does a great job in search, which is what they do, but [consumers] are seeing Google the same as three years ago," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.

Freed said Google's word-of-mouth marketing earned the search engine success in search, but hasn't effectively promoted applications like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Google Earth. "It might be time to step back and grow the market share in these applications."

Valleywag:

Google's basic, utilitarian design -- the hallmark of its appeal in the past -- has become stale and in need of a refresh, analysts suggest ... Web users choose search engines more by habit than anything else, and the Googling habit is well-ingrained. And advertisers make ad buys based on traffic and results, not customer satisfaction, making these results little more than a feather in the also-rans' caps.