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'Google is the king of customer experience in the search engine industry, but Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves are improving,' said Dr. Bonny Brown, director of research and public services for Keynote.

In the survey of some 2000 Web users, Keynote measured more than 250 different aspects including brand impact, future usage, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Google still led the way in overall user experience with Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves and Lycos following behind. Since the launch of Microsoft's own search technology at the end of last year MSN has jumped two places from the previous study carried out last year when it was placed fifth.

Yahoo! also closed the gap on Google. It has improved its search results via the Alltheweb engine it acquired with the purachase of Overture in 2003. Better local search meant that Yahoo! boosted its rating significantly tying with Google on this metric amongst searchers.

That said, local search was most likely the

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cause of frustration amonst users with 22 per cent complaining that local search results did not give them what they were looking for.

Perhaps more worrying for Google is not that the competition is catching up, but that the fickleness of the Web audience means that there is little brand loyalty amongst searchers. Whilst 75 per cent say they have a favourite search engine, 50 per cent say they they will simply move to another if they do not get the results they are looking for. Meanwhile 20 per cent of users say they use different search engines for different queries therefore searchers will be constant evaluating the quality of results they are getting from all the major engines.

MSN is the most improved engine of the last year. In July 2004 it dropped the annoying practice of mixing sponsored and search and began to separate them. This change met with approval by the audience which gave the search engine a much improved user experience. Over 47 per cent of MSN users now say the site's sponsored results are very useful compared to just 37 per cent last time. The introduction of its own home grown search results also added to its overall score.

Whilst Google maintained the number of users who will consider it their primary search engine, the figures have not increased. The number of users who said they would consider Yahoo! as their primary search engine went up by over 20 per cent and MSN by almost 30 per cent.

You can buy the whole report at the Keynote website