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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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.