Study: Consumer satisfaction with news, information Web sites growing

Computerworld - While customers think that e-businesses are getting better, performance varies widely from company to company, according to the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) study released yesterday.
The e-business part of the report includes measurements of search engines, portals, and news and information Web sites.
The study identifies Google and Yahoo as two of the outstanding Web sites overall, according to Ann Arbor, Mich.-based ForeSee Results, the university's e-business partner.
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 over 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 off-line, said Larry Freed, ForeSee's CEO, in the statement.
In the portal category, AOL is the most surprising story this quarter, making a dramatic six-point jump in performance. The increase brings AOL's score to 65, "barely a low pass, but an impressive leap in the right direction," the study said.
Yahoo is still the dominant player in this category with a score of 78, a two-point improvement over last year, and MSN also moved up two points to 74, according to the study.
"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 emerged when looking at the e-business category in the aggregate.
First, two of the three categories -- search engines and portals