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 ASCI since the first year the index included it, in 2002.

Among the top engines, Ask saw the largest gains in satisfaction (5.6%) while Yahoo emerged as the overall winner, beating Google by a single point. But Yahoo and Google were trending in opposite directions, with Yahoo gaining and Google losing a roughly equivalent percentage (see below). AOL saw the biggest decline in satisfaction (-9.5%) of any of the big portals/engines.

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