Google and Yahoo have been identified as two of the
outstanding websites in an e-business survey carried out for the
University of Michigan.
The study, which measures the top 200 companies in this sector
during the second quarter of each year, shows that America Online,
though still not a top performer, has made a dramatic improvement
in the past year and may be on the way to attracting more
customers.
Overall, the ACSI e-business industry score improved year on
year, up from 68.7 (on a scale of 0-100) in 2002 to a score of 71.4
this year.
Google consistently places at the top of the search engine
category; it had a score of 82 this year, while Ask Jeeves improved
its performance by seven points, to 69, according to the study.
Search engine Alta Vista trailed its competitors with a score of
63.
Google's score shows that it has one of the strongest
relationships with its customers of any kind of company, online or
offline, said ForeSee chief executive officer Larry Freed, whose
company is an e-business partner with the university.
In the portal category, AOL made a dramatic six-point jump in
performance, bringing its score to 65.
Yahoo is still the dominant player in this category with a score
of 78, a two-point improvement on last year, and MSN also moved up
two points to 74.
"AOL's improvement is very, very impressive," said Freed.
"People have said AOL was down for the count before and have been
proved wrong."
In the news and information category, MSNBC.com and ABCNews.com
tied with 74 points, followed closely by CNN.com and USAToday.com,
which tied at 72. NYTimes.com brings up the rear again this year
with a score of 70, down one point from last year.
"News sites show every sign of being, basically, a mature
industry," Freed said. "The innovation that we see coming from
hypercompetitiveness in so many online industries just doesn't
exist in the news field."
Freed said two clear trends are emerging.
First, two of the three categories - search engines and portals
- have clearly dominant players, though for laggers in the portal
category, at least, catching up with Yahoo seems possible.
However, he said, in the search engine category, for other
search engines to pull alongside or surpass Google seems like a
long shot.
Second, companies in the portal and search categories that lead
their fields - and are leaders in e-business in general - are doing
a good job of evolving their business models without losing
customer satisfaction, loyalty and brand power.
"It is almost certainly not a coincidence that very strong
customer satisfaction scores and the continued upward trajectory of
these scores is happening in categories [search engines, portals]
that did not exist before the internet, despite continuing
evolution of business model," Freed said.
Linda Rosencrance writes for Computerworld