Yahoo Ranks Highest For IM Services

Yahoo ranked highest among U.S. residential Internet users for instant messaging services, and Dogpile was rated the best among search engines, a market research firm said Wednesday.

Yahoo Messenger topped the list of IM providers for the second consecutive year, performing particularly well in security, performance and reliability, J.D. Power and Associates said. MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger, respectively, followed Yahoo in the rankings. Microsoft owns both services.

The J.D. Power survey also found that the percentage of home Internet service subscribers using IM on a daily basis was unchanged from 2005 at 36 percent.

"This indicates that some of the usage gains we are seeing in text messaging in our wireless studies are coming at the expense of IM usage," Frank Perazzini, director of telecommunications research at J.D. Power, said in a statement.

Dogpile, which was included in the study for the first time, was rated better than the rest in the three factors that determine overall satisfaction within the segment: ease of use, functionality and results. Following Dogpile in the rankings were Ask.com and Google, respectively.Dogpile aggregates search results of all of the major search engines to provide Internet users with a one-stop search. The study found that nearly three in four Internet subscribers use multiple search engines.

Despite failing to take the top spot in customer satisfaction, Google was the primary search engine for more than half of U.S. Internet users, J.D. Power said. Yahoo Search followed with 17 percent, down 4 points from 2005; and AOL Search captured 9 percent of the market.

The annual study is based on responses from 10,787 residential customers of Internet service providers nationwide.