Tech Search

On a scale of 0 to 100, the ACSI--a project set up by the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and frequently cited here--gave Facebook a score of 64.

That's an appallingly low figure, only a few points higher than the lowest-scoring airlines in June's survey or the least-liked cable companies in May's results.

It's also one point above MySpace's miserable 63 in this month's findings. YouTube earned a gentleman's C at 73, and Wikipedia ranked first at 77. Twitter, for some reason, wasn't measured.

Meanwhile, the ACSI ranked the Web sites of the New York Times and USA Today at 76 and 77, with Fox News's site leading that category at 82. (The Post's washingtonpost.com did not figure in its results.)

In a third part of this month's survey, the ACSI ranked Google the second-most-popular option among search engines and Web portals, at 80 ("all others" came in at 82), with Microsoft's Bing in third place at 77.

The ACSI numbers, as its latest press release (PDF) explains, come from "interviews with approximately 70,000 customers annually." I've had little reason to quibble with its findings before, but I have my doubts about today's numbers for social-media sites--the first set it's calculated for that industry.

It's not that I can't think of reasons to grumble about Facebook: the ridiculous games like FarmVille, the silly virtual gifts (though they're going away on Aug. 1), the cringe-inducing behavior of some Facebook users on that site and, of course, Facebook management's pattern of privacy missteps.

But still... a 64 percent score? That seems just a little low to me.