A new study argues that Dogpile gives a better user experience than Google. Pandia is not convinced.

J.D. Power has published a study that seems to indicate that Dogpile performs better than Google as regards “consumer satisfaction”.

J. D. Power reports that Dogpile performs well among Internet service subscribers in three factors that determine overall satisfaction (listed in order of importance): functionality, ease of use and results.

Dog ahead of the pack

The metasearch engine Dogpile gets 818 out of 1000 points. Google is number two with a score of 794, Ask.com number 3 with 784.

?Dogpile continues to differentiate itself from its competition in two key ways,? says Frank Perazzini, director of telecommunications research at J.D. Power and Associates.

?First, Dogpile?s meta search capabilities provide a one-stop search experience for Internet users by aggregating the results of many of the major search engines simultaneously. Secondly, users report that they are particularly satisfied with the limits that Dogpile places on the amount of paid advertising that accompanies search results.?

Hm. We are not convinced.

Mixing paid and organic results

It is certainly true that Dogpile has a simplistic and easy to read interface (as does Google), but if users report that they are particularly satisfied with the limited amount of advertising, it must be because they are unable to differentiate between paid and regular organic results.

It is not that Dogpile does not label sponsored results. They do. But the paid results are given the same design as the regular results. Moreover, they are intermixed with regular results.

Google, on the other hand, puts the sponsored results in separate text boxes, which makes them more visible.

(more…)

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