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Microsoft Workers Prefer Google
dhollist writes "A story just released by the Inquirer shows that 80% of incoming search requests from Microsoft's domain arrived via Google's search engine. In contrast, 64% of Yahoo! staff and 100% of Google staff use their own company's search engine.
How's that for a product endorsement? I'd guess that Microsoft may soon add google.com to the list of blocked URL's on their intranet."
Given the VisitorVille's error margins (e.g. +192.08%) their sample size is crap. Can I hotlink here? http://intelligence.visitorville.com/images/vvi-fr ont-tn.gif if not, just see their site.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
And measured taken over a 6 month period.
Hmm indeed.
Let's see, a tiny sample size and a web site that refers to Microsoft as "the Vole" isn't enough to derail this bad boy from its trip to the front page. After all, it's anti-MS so it MUST be true!
Wait... I have an idea!
1.) Write anti MS blog entry with lots of unsubstantiated or specious claims.
2.) Place tons of AdSense ads on it.
3.) Submit it to Slashdot.
4.) Sit back and watch the cash flow in!
Maybe Slashdot would like to release its server logs of the past five years so we can see what operating system the open source community uses?
I would be interested to see the stats for Firefox versus IE coming from Microsoft...
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
I tried ask.com for a while but gave up -- after I tried hunting for info on Australia's laws on pedophilia, and got told "you're not allowed to make that query" or similar. Well, gee, thanks, in that case I'll take my searches elsewhere ... Google gave me quite a lot of noise, as you point out, but at least it let me find the answer in a minute or so, as opposed to refusing to let me find out at all.
If that's true, you're not phrasing your queries effectively. Google's strength (IMHO) is in its depth, not necessarily it's psychic powers in determining what you're really searching for.
Why do I get the feeling "microsofts domain" included MSN.com, and the reviewer failed to point out that msn is actually an ISP as well. It's real easy for google to attain 100% when they don't actually serve any end users. The results just reek of setup to me.
Okay, Slashdot. You know what to do.
Come on, it's not that hard to get a job here. You just have to try! And it really is a nice place to work. A lot of fun, cool people, (unexpectedly) kind of family-centric, and the pay's nothing to sneeze at either. :) I recommend it to anyone who's thinking about giving it a shot. Don't let the interview process scare you!
If you had read TFA you would have found the link to the real article which links to the original source, and found this:
http://andrewhitchcock.org/companystats/
Firefox has just under 10% from Microsoft, and about 80% from Google.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I never knew Ask.com censored search terms, in the US even.. and there doesn't seem to be a way to bypass it. I wonder what else is on the list.
Looks like I won't be using them any time soon.
MSN used to return "jibber-jabber" because they didn't have their own search engine. I think the engine they used was licensed from Yahoo, but I'm not sure. Only in the last two years, did MSN search start using a Microsoft-developed search engine.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
What one may find surprising is that it takes maybe only 100 people depending on other issues to make a determination. In fact, as few as only a handful of people can be a good sized sample given random selection, in a few cases.
It has to do with standard deviation more than sample size. If one has a sample where 99% of the sample was one way, a sample size of 100 is pretty much all one needs. There's also the fact that sometimes, one doesn't need to find a fact, rather, to contest one. If one takes 20 random people who are at a certain value of a certain attribute, then a claim that people in general are near a certain height with a certain deviation, then one can conclude that's a phoney lie, or that there's evidence supporting it. Statistics is a rather magical mathematical feild. It pays to know it.
So would I. I would still use google even if given a chance to work at Microsoft. Of course, that probably has something to do with the fact that, if they offered me a job, I wouldn't take it.
You can call me dogmatic, but I have a very practical reason for not wanting to work at Microsoft: I've spent the last week or so reading up on SMB and NetBIOS. Egads this stuff is messed up. I had almost come to believe that the stuff about Microsoft software being crap was just bias from open source advocates, but the more I learn about it, the more I realize how truly aweful and stupid it is. And how does this relate to my practical reason for not wanting to work at Microsoft? The reason is, if I worked at Microsoft, there's a reasonable chance I'd end up having to maintain some of this crap. No thank you. They made the bed, and I think I'll leave them to lie in it.
I use to use Yahoo all the time until 5 years ago. I moved over to Google for the fact its faster and more search results. I tried ask.com but eh don't care for it nor like it. Google will always be with me 3333
Linux, because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
I didn't know Microsoft even had a search engine and I've been using the internet since 1995. I first used HotBot, then AltaVista now almost exclusively use Google (mainly because Google caches are available)
Microsoft's stated goal is to beat Google at the search game. It seems pretty logical to me that they would be using Google's and Yahoo's search engines in order to generate competitive intelligence and understand what they are doing wrong. I work at a mobile search startup, and I use Google's and Yahoo's products that compete with ours everyday. While Googlers are busy staring at their own reflection in the mirror, Microsoft just might catch up. If I were Steve Ballmer, I'd be pleased with this.
I wonder how many of them use Firefox instead. Or how many aren't even running windows.
Totally correct, everyone I know uses google to search msdn for quick answers to api refs. Using the MSDN search is absolutely painful.
I call bullshit. The numbers are likely inflated, and here's why:
Say a Microsoft employee performs a search on both Google and MSN/Live.com. They compare the search results, and see which one is better. I'm guessing this happens relatively often. Now, the MSN search may or may not have what they're looking for... maybe they click a couple links, maybe they don't. But Google's pre-fetching mechanism starts downloading the top 3 or so pages. They automatically get hits, whether the user clicks on them or not. If you decide the search terms you used were wrong, and re-search on both without clicking anything, Google just generated 3 hits "coming from their search results". I'm not saying they're trying to inflate leads -- pre-fetching is a valid technique -- but you have to take it into account when you look at these numbers.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
According to http://andrewhitchcock.org/ (which seems to be the source) the search for "Britney Spears" is well above the search for "porn", and I just dont buy it.
Oh wait, now that I think about it he did not include the search for "lesbians caught in the act while I was walking my ferret". Which Specifically does not include the word "porn". I begin to see the issue...
Anyhow, this Andrew guy has articles dateing back to 2001. Its mostly trivial stuff relating to his life until recently. And then it relates to google. So my guess is that people who do a search on google sift through the pages of results and end up on his site. The way I figure it you pretty much have to be interested in google or Andrew before you could wind up there. So his statistics are probably correct. However, the test is screwed to begin with.
So in the end there are two flaws. The fact that Nick Farrell does not seem to care about what he writes as long as its antagonistic (I use this one sample only as evidence) and the second flaw is that we are talking about it.
Besides, I didnt see my searches for "lesbians" anywhere in the statistics, which doesn't seem quite right.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
I've noticed that my website (with low traffic) also gets hits from IP addresses that resolve to microsoft.com from a search on Google. However, if you look at what they searched for, it looks like they are really students looking for the answer to some 2nd year university level homework problems. (OK so you can refrain from the jokes about Microsoft employees searching for these things.) My guess is that somehow the IP addresses are either being reported wrong by accident or are being spoofed (at least to the reporting tool). In other words, I'd be willing to bet that these are not really hits from inside Microsoft (at least not most of them).
Thanks for the extra information about the search terms used to reach your site. People interested in your page on might also be interested in Google and therefore likely to be Google users themselves. Again this could mean that the sample is not representative.
;)
The second source helps confirm the conclusions though.
I think it's great that you made these statistics, it's just a shame that Slashdot linked to such a poor article which doesn't explain how the figures were calculated and what the errors margins are. I guess that's what Slashdot's 'Comments' section is for.
Thanks again for replying!
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Ask.com is worse than MSN or Yahoo. We once recently got an email from the higher-ups expressing their disapointment that something to the effect of 90% of all searches in the company were to Google.com and not Ask.com.
I say this as an Ask employee and post this anonymously for this reason.
Or, the results are actually Microsoft mining Googles search engine. If they got enough results, they should be able to recreate the algorithms.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Google has the best search results. Microsoft employees know that. They use the best tool for the job. So?
Wasn't there a Slashdot story in the past on how a lot of the Microsoft researchers use Linux machines for their daily work? If it makes them do their job better (because they come from a Unix background), why would anyone forbid that?
Besides, does every secretary working at Microsoft have to know they do search as well and are in some competition with Google? Microsoft is much bigger than Google and does a lot more.
This is only if the browser they are using supports link prefetching.
Last I checked, IE didn't.
What else would Microsoft employees be using? Firefox? If so that's as funny as Google.
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
Then they'd use maybe 20% times google (vs another 20% MSN) for benchmarks/debug/comparison, then another 60% MSN for standard dogfood-eating queries. Instead they use the 20-20% ratio for benchmarking then use Google instead of MSN.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Before the quality of search results I Think the main problem with both MSN and Yahoo! is all the crap on their site. Google is plain and simple, when people to go a site with the specific intent of searching why would they want to look at all that junk?
I'm sure MS employees know how to use quotes, operators, and boolean logic to find the answers to their questions through Google, and given that Google is reported to have the largest catalog of results, it can be safely assumed that they're only using Google because they know how to retrieve the information they're searching quickly.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Bizarrly they even allow paedophilia and pædophilia which are both correct spelling of the word. In fact paedophilia is probably the more common spelling in the UK. So basically it's wrong to want to know anything about paedophilia if you're American.
Whenever I'm looking for something on MSDN, I use Google instead of the MSDN-search box. Google indexes the Microsoft site a lot better than MS does itself. So I can understand that MS-employees use Google. As long as they can't get their own site indexed properly, they can't beat Google.
None of the modern search engines are meta tag based any longer.