Bing’s customer satisfaction jumps, nearly matches Google’s

Bing might be the butt of many a joke in the technology world, but the ‘second’ search engine seems to be effectively wooing the public.

According to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index, Bing’s customer satisfaction rate jumped 5 points from 77 in 2010, to 82 in 2011, moving it to second place under Google. YouTube and Facebook sat towards the bottom of the list, garnering only 74 and 66 points respectively.

Google’s position atop the list was secured by its rating of 83. That represents a 3 point gain over its 2010 score. Given the two search engine’s growth rates, 5 points during the year for Bing, and 3 for Google, if they both manage the same momentum, Bing will have a better customer satisfaction score than Google, albeit by a single point, in 2012.

However, given that Facebook has such a low score, and is yet so massively popular and is growing so quickly, it seems that ‘customer satisfaction,’ at least as measured by American Customer Satisfaction Index, is not a perfect indicator of market success.

Perhaps what is most interesting here is change in customer satisfaction, and not a service’s final raw score. That Google is performing well is hardly a surprise, for example. That analysis of the data actually ends up well for Bing, given its fast satisfaction growth in the last year.

Finally, Bing has been running massive campaigns that tout its abilities as a capable product. It could be that those advertisements are in fact skewing opinion without changing search volume. For now, though, both Bing and Google are doing very well in the eyes of consumers, and are neck and neck for the most satisfactory web service. Long live the search wars.