Aug 18, 2009 at 8:50am ET by Greg Sterling

On an annual basis the University of Michigan puts out the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business report, sponsored and administered by Foresee Results. Among the things the index examines is consumer satisfaction with search engines. The survey asks a representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to several criteria, which produces an overall score on a 100 point scale. Google is again on top in search with a score of 86, identical to last year. The survey is supposed to be predictive of future consumer behavior, as t [...]

Citigroup Study Says Google More Relevant Than Bing

Jul 8, 2009 at 9:25am ET by Barry Schwartz

Citigroup conducted a study comparing 200 queries on Google, Yahoo and Bing. The study found that Google is much more relevant than Bing, in returning relevant results. Google returned the most relevant result 71 percent of the time, compared with Bing at 49 percent of the time and Yahoo 30 percent of the time. The queries picked were pulled mostly from Google Zeitgeist, Microsoft's xRank and Yahoo Buzz in the categories of Entertainment, Health, Local, News, Retail, Sports, Travel and Other. Then after running the 200 queries, Citigroup picked the winner based on two criteria: 1) R [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Relevancy

What Ads Types Are Most “Helpful”? Search Ads Follow Newspapers, TV

Jul 2, 2009 at 11:59am ET by Greg Sterling

Trade magazine AdWeek and pollster Harris Interactive conducted a survey in early June among 2,521 US adults. People were asked what types of ads they found most "helpful" and what types of ads they ignored. Below are the top-line results as well as the age and geographically segmented data. Most helpful in making purchase decisions: 37 percent say that television ads are most helpful 17 percent say newspaper ads are most helpful 14 percent say search engine ads are helpful Radio ads (3 percent) and Internet banner ads (1 percent) are not considered helpful by many people 28 per [...]

Blind Search White Labels Search Results For Comparison

Jun 8, 2009 at 9:26am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google Blogoscoped reports we have a new blind search taste test in town at blindsearch.fejus.com. The way this blind search test works is that you enter a query and you vote for the best search results without knowing who the search results came from. Unfortunately, the site was hit by a guy who "gamed the system" and the data is currently skewed by that individual. They do promise to remove the fake data in the near future. In addition, the person who created the site works for Microsoft but claims this is not a "Microsoft initiative." This reminds me of a test I ran back in 2005, w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Relevancy

Satya Nadella Keynote At Bing Search Summit

Jun 4, 2009 at 1:52pm ET by Greg Sterling

Satya Nadella, SVP of Microsoft's Online Services Division, gave the morning keynote at the Microsoft Search Summit. It was an introduction to and tour of Bing and adCenter upgrades and improvements. Nadella began with a review of the search market and its growth. He was initially apologetic to the audience about Microsoft's market share. He proceeded to outline the problems with the current state of search that Bing tries to address. Nadella said "only 1 in 4 queries deliver successful results." This is based on Microsoft's observation of search user behavior from historical Live Search lo [...]

Survey Says: Google Leads In Consumer Satisfaction

Aug 19, 2008 at 8:31am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google Leads in Search Satisfaction from adAge.com reports that Google not only is leading in the University of Michigan and ForeSee Results in American Consumer Satisfaction Index, but is also "surging" in growth. Google scored an 86 in the index, up 10.3% in consumer satisfaction from last year. While Yahoo was down 2.5% to 77, Microsoft's MSN remained at 75, and Ask.com dropped 1.3% to 74. AOL did increase by 3% to 69, but lost a lot from the year prior and is still not where they were then, which was 74. The scores don't seem to be live yet at the ACSI web site, but when they are, you [...]

Looking For The Paris Hilton Campaign Video — How’d The Search Engines Do?

Aug 6, 2008 at 1:33pm ET by Danny Sullivan

As much as I've enjoyed comedians poking fun at John McCain's ad that uses Paris Hilton to mock Barack Obama, even better is a new fake ad where Paris Hilton herself takes on McCain. People are clearly turning to the web to find it -- Google Trends shows plenty of people seeking it in a variety of ways. A quick look at that below, how easily (or not) the video can be found on search engines, and the video itself. First, as I said, Google Trends reflects a variety of ways the public is seeking that video: paris hilton commercial paris hilton mccain ad paris hilton site youtube.com [...]

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Microsoft Paper: Improving Search Results By Mining Web Surfing Activity

Apr 28, 2008 at 6:46am ET by Danny Sullivan

A new research paper from Microsoft looks at how surfing behavior -- as logged by a search toolbar -- can be used to improve search results. The study used data from the Windows Live Toolbar: For each user, interaction logs were grouped based on browser identifier information. Within each browser instance, user navigation was summarized as a path known as a browser trail, from the first to the last Web page visited in that browser. Located within some of these trails are search trails that originated with a query submission to a commercial search engine; it is these search trails [...]

Yahoo Makes Big Customer Satisfaction Gains In Search

Feb 19, 2008 at 2:58pm ET by Greg Sterling

The Yahoo Search Blog discusses improvements in consumer satisfaction scores for Yahoo Search, according to the most recent Keynote Customer Experience Rankings of search engines. According to Keynote Systems, "Yahoo! is, indeed, achieving noticeable improvements in user experience and beginning to close the gap with Google in several key search experience drivers." Yahoo calls out a particular metric, "Search Assist & Suggestions Rankings," where it apparently outperforms Google, based on the introduction in October of Search Assist: Source: Yahoo/Keynote Systems (2008) However, despite [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Relevancy

Center For The Digital Future: Perceptions Of Search Reliability And Accuracy Declining

Jan 18, 2008 at 10:13am ET by Greg Sterling

The University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication's Center for the Digital Future is engaged in an ambitious longitudinal study on consumer behavior and media usage. Each year the center surveys the same 2,000 US adults to track attitudes toward media as well as any changes in actual media consumption. This year the center found a number of consumer attitude changes, including more skepticism about the reliability and accuracy of search results. You can download a summary of the report here; highlights are below. The report found that the internet is now considered t [...]

With Dogpile Beating Google In Satisfaction, Owner InfoSpace Needs To Reinvent Itself, Be Risky With Metasearch

Oct 18, 2007 at 3:29pm ET by Greg Sterling

InfoSpace recently sold both its local and directory assets and its mobile platform business to Idearc/Superpages and Motricity respectively. So what's left? Specifically Dogpile and its cousins Metacrawler, Webcrawler and the domain InfoSpace.com. The company also owns the kid-friendly search site Zoo.com. Amid all this, JD Power & Associates has just named Dogpile "highest in customer satisfaction among search engines" for the second year. There were different results coming out of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index survey of "e-business," which includes search engines. However, the [...]

Ask Jumps, Google Slips and Yahoo Leads American Customer Satisfaction Index for Search

Aug 14, 2007 at 8:16am ET by Greg Sterling

For the first time, Yahoo has beaten Google in the annual University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The survey measures U.S. consumer satisfaction across a broad range of business and product categories including "e-business," which covers search. The survey asks a statistically representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to a number of criteria, which produces an overall satisfaction score on a 100 point scale. The search/portal category has been rated since 2000. Until this year, Google has always lead the A [...]

Are Search Engines Biased?

Jul 23, 2007 at 9:08am ET by Barry Schwartz

Search Engines and Favoritism from Google Operating System has put together a quick study comparing the top results from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's search engines. The results showed that for 10 generic searches, the search engines (excluding Microsoft) tend to rank their own properties higher than their competitors. For example, "Google ranked its own sites as #1 in 7 cases out of 10 and Yahoo in 6 cases out of 10," said Ionut Alex Chitu. Ionut queried terms like mail, calendar, groups, toolbar, maps, desktop search, image search, video search, news search and search and plotted the res [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Relevancy

London Car Bombs: The Big Fat Search Failure

Jun 29, 2007 at 5:09pm ET by Danny Sullivan

I was in London last night right smack in the area where a large bomb was defused this morning. Naturally, I was curious about what exactly had happened. I hit the news sites, but then I wondered what would happen for those searching generally for information using search engines. Both Google and Ask.com in particular have promised that their new search interfaces should naturally get us relevant news information. Both failed, as far as I'm concerned. Let's take a look. To test, I looked for [london bombs]. I think that's a reasonable way many people would be seeking information about what hap [...]

Study: Good Brand Can Make Search Seem More Relevant

Jun 28, 2007 at 9:42am ET by Barry Schwartz

Penn State released a report -- Branding matters -- even when searching -- that claims the brand value of a search engine can make searchers believe results are better or worse than they are. The study showed that when a searcher was given an identical result set across Google, Yahoo, Windows Live Search and an in house search engine, Google and Yahoo came out as more relevant. Why? Because of the brand of the search engine. Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house sea [...]

Mossberg, Ask.com “Goes Much Further” Than Google

Jun 28, 2007 at 9:06am ET by Barry Schwartz

Ask.com Takes Lead In Designing Display Of Search Results by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal reviews Ask.com's new 3D look. Mossberg gave Ask.com great reviews, comparing Ask.com's three-pane approach to Google's Universal Search approach. Mossberg said Ask.com "took greater strides" than Google with their user interface. The new Ask.com user interface makes for a "better advance in unifying" the different levels of vertical search options available to the searcher, said Mossberg. He explained that this makes "search results easy to navigate and use" than Ask.com's competitors. [...]

Dogpile: Search Results On Major Engines Diverging

Jun 1, 2007 at 9:45am ET by Greg Sterling

InfoSpace-owned metasearch engine Dogpile, which recently refreshed its homepage and made other, minor changes, published the results of its second "search overlap" study. The first study, released in 2005 and commissioned from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University, found that 84.9 percent of results on search engines were unique to one engine and not found on competitor sites. The study involved Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and also found that among 12,570 random user-defined queries just over 1 percent of first page search results were the same across the engines [...]

Return To The Search Engine Shoot-Out

May 3, 2007 at 4:03am ET by Phil Bradley

My colleague Chris Sherman briefly looked at the PC World ‘Search Engine Shoot-out’ article the other day, and I also mentioned it in my own weblog. I read through the article briefly, but something about it kept nagging me, so I wanted to go back and look at it in rather more detail. The more I look at it, the more concerns I have over the piece. The first concern of course is the idea that there’s a ‘best search engine’. There’s very little difference between saying that and saying that there is a ‘best reference book’ or ‘best President’ or ‘best television programme� [...]

Stop Presses! Google Bested In Search Shoot-Out!

Apr 25, 2007 at 5:07pm ET by Chris Sherman

PC World has released the results of its most recent search engine shoot-out, and surprise, surprise, found that "Google is indeed the best search engine." However... This wasn't just a casual test, and Google wasn't the best across the board with all types of queries and content. The author tested 55 services in six categories: general (text info), video, mobile/local, news, images, and blogs. The goal was to simulate how "real people" searched, so no special commands or modifiers were used. In the text category, the real surprise was in the two search engines that bested Google: AlltheWe [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Relevancy

30% Of Results For Some Competitive Searches Found To Be Spam

Mar 19, 2007 at 1:37pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages from the NY Times reports on a recent paper from Microsoft Research released named "Spam Double-Funnel: Connecting Web Spammers with Advertisers" [PDF download] (also note that Gary linked to it Friday). The report categorizes search results spam by industry category, showing that some search categories have a 30% or more rate of spam. Here is a chart covering various : Read this from section 4.0: In late September 2006, we submitted the 1,000 keywords to the Search Ranger system, which retrieved the top-50 results from all three major se [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEO: Spamming | Stats: General | Stats: Relevancy

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