Maybe Yahoo is not so good at search but is the best portal out there, at least according to the latest data released in the American Customer Satisfaction Index report compiled by the University of Michigan.

According to ACSI, Yahoo had improved 4% in the last year and scored 79 points on the 100-point scale Thanks to this performance it took the lead over Google for portals and search engines.

“A number of design changes and enhancements are paying off paying off for Yahoo! in higher customer satisfaction, which will be critical to turning around this year’s lackluster financials.” the report noted.

For Yahoo is the best news since two months ago when the company announced that Terry Semel, the CEO of the company in the last six years, will be replaced by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

Semel’s replacement was seen as a sign that shareholders have been dissatisfied with his performance and with Yahoo’s lag behind Internet rival Google.

And speaking about Google, in the latest ACSI list the Mountain View company has fallen by 4% from a year ago to a score of 78. It is the second consecutive yearly decline and the first time when Google’s ACSI score has dipped below 80 since it was added to the index in 2000.

But the most surprising score in the ACSI’s list was registered by Ask.com. The portal was up by 6% to a score of 75, still behind Google, but it is a very good result. Microsoft’s MSN scored the same result as Ask.com, but it raise was only 1.4 percent compared to last year.

Meanwhile AOL suffers the largest plunge in customer satisfaction this quarter, down 10% to the lowest score in the industry (67).

For those of you who are not familiar with the ACSI, we have to say that the American Customer Satisfaction Index is a national economic indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United States

It is updated each quarter with new measures for different sectors of the economy replacing data from the prior year. The overall ACSI score for a given quarter factors in scores from about 200 companies in 43 industries and from government agencies over the previous four quarters.

But let’s take also a quick look at the PC industry. According to the report, overall customer satisfaction with the PC industry falls 3% to a score of 75.

Apple and Dell contribute the most to the decline in customer satisfaction, each dropping 5%. Despite the drop, Apple still is the industry leader in customer satisfaction, with a score of 79.

“Apple has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years,” said P Professor Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan. “As Toyota can attest, it’s not easy to manage quality and customer satisfaction when a company quickly has to increase production or provide service to a larger number of customers.”

Hewlett-Packard’s HP division improved 1% to 76, though its Compaq division is the worst in the industry at 73.

The most significant increase was achieved by Gateway. Its index has raised 2.7 percent and the company gained 75 points in ACSI list.