While Google may be the numero uno in terms of Web search, Yahoo! is a few notches ahead when it comes to consumer satisfaction...

Or so reveals data from the University of Michigan's American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

The survey found Yahoo! to have risen by 3.9 percent over the last year to reach a customer satisfaction score of 79 out of 100 points. And Google to have fallen by around 3.7 percent to reach a score of 78 points, one point behind Yahoo!.

Larry Freed, chief executive of Foresee Results, which sponsored the ACSI report, expressed the view that the positive perception of Yahoo! stems mainly from the relaunch of it's main site and the various offshoots that are now gaining ground. He said people have gotten comfortable with the Yahoo! interface, and that it continues to be dominant in terms of it's core strengths -- communities and sub-functions.

By comparison, Freed said Google needs to figure out how to leverage all those great applications they've developed. For the average consumer, Google today is the same as what he/she saw three years ago.

In response to the survey, all that a Google spokesperson had to say was that they are always working to provide users the best online experience, and that they welcome strong competition for it helps drive market innovation.

Meanwhile, the ACSI report found Microsoft's customer satisfaction score to have risen by 1.4 percent; Ask.com's to have risen by 5.6 percent to reach 75 points; while that of AOL to have fallen by more than 9 percent to 67 points.

The ACSI data is collected basis interviews of nearly 70,000 customers to measure satisfaction with over 200 companies panning across 45 industries.

However, as regards the Internet vertical, the survey combines two different categories; namely, search engines and portals. And it is on the basis of Yahoo!'s portal strength that the survey found Yahoo! to edge out Google -- for the first time!