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.

If you search for search engine marketing in Dogpile 11 out of 20 results are paid text ads. That is around 50 percent. A similar search in Google gives around 50 percent for sponsored results as well.

We know that the percentage will vary from query to query, and — in Google’s case — also based on geographical location and personal preferences, but there is no reason to say that Google is more advertising heavy than Dogpile.

SEO Disco uses a less diplomatic language than us, but the message is the same:

“Okay, seriously. Who uses Dogpile? I just tried it, out of curiosity, and it sucks! The sponsored ads mixed in with the results are not only irrelevant in most instances, but annoying as all hell!”

A better interface? Nah!

Could it be that the respondents of Power find the Dogpile interface less cluttered and more easily accessible than Google’s, even if you do not take the different ways of presenting ads into consideration?

We really cannot see why this should be the case. Dogpile has a different color scheme than Google and it has a nice dog on the home page, but the search result pages are — apart from the presentation of ads — more or less identical.

Mind you, it is not that we do not like Dogpile. It is a decent metasearch engine which do give the searcher the benefit of accessing results from Google, Yahoo!, Live and Ask at the same time. But it does not give us a better search experience than Google.

Search increase

J. D. Power also reports that the number of customers who report using search engines on a daily basis has increased from 66 percent in 2006 to 70 percent in 2007. Google has an increase in usage of 7 percentage points from 2006 to 58 percent in 2007, which makes it number one.

Now, that we can believe!