We recently asked if the quality of Google’s search results has dropped and it seems a recent study backs up the discussion.

The latest Rasmussen Report, based on a recent survey of internet users, revealed that 70% of the respondents said that their query generated too much irrelevant data and 13% saying that they never found what they were actually looking for. According to them the answers (relevant results) are there but there is much of noise around (irrelevant results).

But its not all bad news – 89% rated the leading search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing between good to excellent, while fewer than half a percent users rating the search engines as poor. The full break down the result is as follows:

• 47% – Excellent
• 42% – Good
• 10% – Fair
• 0% – Poor (technically between 0% and 1%, but specific figure not given)
• 1% – Not sure

The survey was conducted over 740 Adult Internet users nationwide on 4th -5th January 2010 with a margin of sampling error is +/- 4 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

Its also worth noting that most users remain loyal to one particular search engine, judging by the response to this question:

“Do you generally use the same Internet search engine all the time?”

78% of the users responded by saying yes. What would have been better was if they also asked which search engine was used. Although, knowing that Google is the most popular search engine used in the US one can easily assume that these 78% were referring predominantly to Google.

I hope Google and the other major search engines took note of the results of this study. It seems they still have a bit of work to do before users are fully satisfied with the results provided.

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