Google, Yahoo! and MSN lead the customer experience for search engines

The Keynote Customer Experience Rankings for the Search Engine Industry are based on research with 2,000 consumers as they interacted with leading search engines. In addition to traditional opinion data, Keynote collects detailed qualitative and behavioral data as users perform tasks at each site. The Yahoo! and MSN search engines are closing the gap with Google by improving the search experience for consumers and that will lead to increased usage for those sites.

The quality of local search results is a major frustration to many search engine users. Across all search sites, almost one in four (22%) users complain that the local results are not what they are looking for or are not ranked appropriately. Yahoo! showed significant improvement in the ranking of the quality of its local search results, tying Google in leading the industry in this key category. Even though 75% of users say they have one primary search engine, when search expectations are not met up to 50% of users will turn to another search engine as an alternative. Additionally, up to 20% of users regularly use different search engines for different types of searches.