For 2011, the ACSI gave Apple its highest-ever score, awarding it 87 points out of a possible 100. That’s one point more than it gave the company in its 2010 survey, and nine points more than the score it gave its nearest rival, Hewlett-Packard. It’s also nine points above the industry average of 78.

In other words, Apple’s customer experience and user experience in PCs — and tablets, which were included in the ACSI’s rankings — is second to none. No one else is even close.

Which is not to say Apple is immune from customer satisfaction issues. Clearly, it has suffered one or two in the past. But overall, its commitment to innovation and dedication to that core value ingrained in it by Chairman Steve Jobs — “We just want to make great products” — are clearly paying off. And this eight-year ACSI sweep is testament to that.

Apple’s score is a new record in the personal-computer category, one that’s nine points higher than the company’s closest competitors–Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Acer, which all tied with a satisfaction rating of 77. Apple has claimed the top spot in the ACSI’s personal-computer rankings for seven straight years; the last time it was beaten was in 2003, when Dell bested it by a single point.

Impressive, eh? Now get this: The ACSI didn’t note this in its formal release, but its PC survey included the iPad. And evidently the iPad scored quite high. Higher than the Mac, actually.

“People said they find the iPad more satisfying than the Mac,” ACSI’s managing director David VanAmburg told me. “And that helped goose Apple’s ranking.” He added that that makes the iPad the highest-scoring product Apple sells and by extension the highest-scoring product ACSI has ever recorded.

Great news for Apple, particularly since folks obviously find the Mac pretty damn satisfying.

Now, the company’s certainly not without its customer-satisfaction issues; Antennagate is testament to that. But its facility in creating easy and compelling user experiences and dedication to those core values that CEO Steve Jobs often mentions–”We just want to make great products”–are clearly paying off, as this seven-year ACSI sweep demonstrates. And there’s a lesson for the rest of the industry there. “The biggest asset Apple has had for a long time is its commitment to innovation,” VanAmburg told CNN. “Others are improving, but the whole world watches Apple when it comes up with its new products each year.”

[Image credit: Gizmodo commenter Ahubbuch and ACSI ]

The company has once again achieved top rank among Internet search engines and portals in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, the seventh time it has done so in eight years. This year Google (GOOG) received 86 points, out of a possible 100, besting Yahoo’s (YHOO) 77 points, Microsoft’s (MSFT) 75, Ask.com’s 74 and AOL’s 70.

That’s a nice lead and one Google should have no trouble maintaining if it stays its course. This, in spite of Microsoft’s new search effort, Bing, and its “boatloads of value” search deal with Yahoo.

Though the latest ACSI scores don’t reflect either (they were complied prior to Bing’s launch and the Microsoft-Yahoo announcement) Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which compiles the rankings, doesn’t see them doing much to undermine Google. As Freed notes, Google is unquestionably king of search and the only competition in ACSI’s search category is for second place.

“Where will Bing’s market share come from? From Yahoo and MSN initially and maybe from Ask.com, though Ask is a niche player with stable customer satisfaction and market share,” Freed said. “It seems unlikely that customers will actually leave Google in enough numbers to allow Bing to seriously challenge Google’s market dominance, given Google’s extremely high customer satisfaction.”

Freed adds: “People are happy with Google, so why would they switch? They might switch if Bing is better, and that’s a tall order considering Google is the second-highest scoring ACSI service-sector company, behind Newegg.com. Bing has been called a search engine war ‘game changer,’ but Google’s game will be very hard to change at this point. If anyone can do it, it’s the combined resources and market share of Yahoo and MSN.”

“We haven’t seen anything like this before, where a company scores 10 points over its nearest rival,” said ACSI head Claes Fornell. “It’s almost an aligning of the stars. There was a question mark last year about Apple, that maybe it had taken its eye off the ball by concentrating on the iPhone, but now, the iPhone and iPod and Mac are nicely aligned.”

Of course, ACSI scores don’t yet reflect the the pair of black eyes Apple’s (AAPL) suffered in the past few months courtesy of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe. And they will undoubtedly weigh heavily on the company’s next ranking. Said Fornell, “Apple will be very difficult to catch, but I don’t think that these results, where there’s a 10-point difference, will hold.”