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."

Comments

Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket

[ClamIAm]

Film at 11.

Re:Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket

[Anonymous Coward]

"CHAIRS CHAIRS CHAIRS!"

Re:Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket

[entropy123]

Microsoft has a search engine?

Re:Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket

[rvw]

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.

Steve Ballmer is going to bury google...

[Donniedarkness]

...in search queries!!

....and chairs. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Most common search phrase

[Anonymous Coward]

free flying chair screensaver

Re:Most common search phrase

[__aaclcg7560]

Finally, I can replace my "Bill Gates Does Windows" screensaver.

Re:Most common search phrase

[FhnuZoag]

Dammit, I actually checked that.

Amazing that no one on the internet has actually made such a screensaver.

Re:Most common search phrase

[phreakv6]

well.. dont worry about the screensaver because someone on the internet has made this

I've switched

[Anonymous Coward]

over to ask.com and haven't looked back. While ask.com may have a smaller catalog of indexed sites, the signal-to-noise ratio is far and away better.

Re:I've switched

[Petrushka]

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.

Re:I've switched

[Anonymous Coward]

... after I tried hunting for info on Australia's laws on pedophilia ...

So, you were searching for info on Australia's laws on pedophilia, were you?
Well, why WERE you doing that?

Hmmm, it's a little suspicious. ... Wait, are you some kind of ... lawyer???!!!

Re:I've switched

[donscarletti]

Australia has no laws on pedophilia.

Pedophilia is a sexual fixation on children before puberty, most child molesters are not pedophiles and a few pedophiles are not child molesters. IIRC most sex crimes involving children are born out of the availability of that child, rather than a sick fixation on pre pubecents.

Australian states have laws prohibiting the carnal knowledge of a minor (under 16 in all states IIRC) and anal penetration of a minor (18 in most states, 16 in some).

Australian states also have laws imposing harsher sentances for sexual / indecent assult or rape involving children and broader definitions of what a sexual or indecent assault is in these context.

There are federal laws prohibiting Australian citizens/residents from having sexual contact with minors (under 16) overseas, especially underage prostitutes/sex slaves.

There are also laws restricting underage (under 18) pornography making it an offence to obtain or posess such media and an even bigger offense to create or supply it.

There are also restrictions on the employment of sex offenders in industries that involve children. All child related facilities must be audited by the department of community service to ensure that they do not employ people convicted of sexual and/or violent crime.

Penalties for most of these things are moderately harsh compared to similar countries, though carnal knowledge of a willing minor is not treated as harshly as it is in the US where it is considered to be a type of rape and sentanced as such.

IANAL by the way. I just picked up a bit of legal knowledge from my lawyer parents. As an early teenager, my parents liked to remind me that if I was to have sex with a girl my age we would both be committing a fellony. I was always a computer geek so it never made any difference.

I wouldn't do it..

[viniosity]

I'd guess that Microsoft may soon add google.com to the list of blocked URL's on their intranet.

Personally, I would keep the floodgates open. What better metric do you have than if you own employees use your product? If they shut it they'll have a harder time estimating how successful they are at capturing the search market.

Generally, there are three components to a successful marketing campaign: Awareness, Trial, and Repurchase. MS has the benefits of Awareness and Trial at with their own employee base and are just sucking at the last portion. Once they get that right internally, they've got the pockets to tackle the first two.

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[Anonymous Coward]

The classic Microsoft 'slogan' is "eat your own dog food"; in other words, the programmers use the products they are developing, during the development process. This is ostensibly to iron out bugs. Using MSN search makes a lot of sense in that context. However, crucially, they need benchmarks to compare their search against. Google has been commonly recognised as the de facto standard, so should be used as a rival.

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[killjoe]

They are probably using google to search MSDN like the rest of us are. It's usually much faster to search the MS KB and MSDN with google then to use the search "feature" of the MS web site.

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[SleepyHappyDoc]

So, what this article is really saying is, MSN Search isn't even worth feeding to the dogs.

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[incest]

Personally, I would keep the floodgates open. What better metric do you have than if you own employees use your product? If they shut it they'll have a harder time estimating how successful they are at capturing the search market.

Eh, I'd take the exact opposite stance. Programmers are, let's face it, completely nerdy compared to the general population. My dad, for example, writes e-mails in all capital letters. He doesn't know not to, and I figure he's old enough to have the right to e-mail people however the hell he wants. A programmer would never write an e-mail like that. They're not who Microsoft is targetting. They're trying to get all the people juuuuuuuuuust smart enough to listen to their kids/friends/parents/uncles/that neighbor boy with the warez ad in the local newspaper when they say, "switch to Firefox and I wouldn't have to fix this every other week" and "ask.com sucks, use google."

Because that's a gigantic chunk of the market, and that's probably where your boss lives. And your boss has a lot more control over the software purchasing than the programmers.

In any case, since I don't think the metric's particularly good, that's one reason to shut it down. The other is just the ol' "eating our own dog food" thing. This is an ugly piece of PR from MS's perspective. They look like their own employees are saying they have inferior software. Mostly because they do (I think. I'm sure some astroturfer will be willing to explain to me why that's wrong, whether I ask for it or not). But it doesn't matter if the employees use google because google threatened to kill their significant other and/or kids and/or dog or because the microsoft search engine requires you to infect yourself with AIDS before you can use it--the PR potential of the facts is still bad.

Plus, I'd imagine being forced to use the crappy MS search engine would spur those engineers on to new heights of programming just to try to make the damn thing the Google Killer they want it to be. And lest ye all think I'm some kind of mindless anti-Microsoft drone cleverly disguised as an Internet pervert, I assure you, I would use Microsoft's search engine if it were better than google's. That's a big if, I think, but I'll give them a shot at it. I think they're going to fail, but I'll give them their shot. Hell, I used to think I'd never be willing to spend the time it takes to download mp3's. I have been wrong before.

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[Waffle Iron]

What? You don't like results along the lines of:

Query: printf

1. Windows CE toaster edition v1.0: ActiveDataSourceExchangeObject.printf()

2. Windows CE toaster edition v1.1: ActiveDataSourceExchangeObject.printf()

3. Windows CE.NET beta cellphone edition: ActiveDataSourceExchangeObject.printf()

4. Windows CE.NET beta microwave oven edition: ActiveDataSourceExchangeObject.printf()

...

87. Visual C/C++ Library Reference: printf()

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[plover]

My dad, for example, writes e-mails in all capital letters. He doesn't know not to, and I figure he's old enough to have the right to e-mail people however the hell he wants. A programmer would never write an e-mail like that.

Speak for yourself, young'n. I was programming before you were an itch in your daddy's pants. And back when I was a kid, we only HAD capital letters. Yes, sir, a six-bit character set was all we had, and we liked it! We were grateful for every one of the six bits we were given, thankful that we had a character set that supported both letters AND numbers.

Who needed those fancy-schmancy lower case letters, anyway? They were for show-offs, them and their lah-dee-dah eight-bit character sets. "Oooh, look at me, Mater, I've got both UPPER and lower case in my EBCDIC character set! I'm off to punch cards by the Grand Piano!" Well, we didn't have that rich-kid kind of money. Even if our terminal controllers did send us seven bits, we only had an upper case font cylinder in our Model 33 TeleType. And it was good enough for us! And we sent our email to real names, like SWEETHEART and PILOT and POET, not to any of these special character leet-speeking punks, them and their hoity-toity "domains"....

... zzzZZZzzz ...

Wha? What are you doing here? Get off my lawn, you damn kids!

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[spongman]

yeah, they'll just patch their proxies to rewrite the 'Referrer:' headers...

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[10Ghz]

You had a character-set? Damn you were lucky! Back in MY day all we had was a bunch of rocks, and we communicated by banging the rocks together. And what is this "programming" you talk about? All we could do wast to make a big pile of rocks, and smash it with even bigger rocks, hoping that something useful came from it. And we LIKED it that way!

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[Vo0k]

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.

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Rocks!! Do you know what we would have done for rocks! A good honest rock could get you places.

No Sir. All we had was mud. Mud and straw. We used to pile the mud up into segments to make registers and then use the straw to represent numbers. We didn't have any of your holier than thou binary formats. No Sir. We had unary and we liked it. Our ALU was just Andy, Larry and Upton. Andy would do the addin', Larry the subtractin', and Upton would move the straw around. He was a good kid.

And if you wanted "memory", huh!, memory, well sir you could just pile up some more mud for fifteen miles to get about a kilobyte. Can't say that Upton would thank you for it, mind. Course in those days all our algorithims only needed about twelve bits of memory, so you could get by with only two fields or so of mud segments.

Capital letters! Huh! We didn't even have letters. We just sent and recieved the datastreams as raw numbers. You had to figure out yourself what was going on. The straws were floated to us down small rivers. Pretty bad packet loss, and in those days if you lost a packet, well sir, you had to go upstream and danm well find it again, or there'd be no mud supper for you! Great days.

Rocks! Some people don't know what honest labour is anymore.

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[aymanh]

I know your comment is a joke, but the article suggests that the study in question checked for IP addresses originating from Microsoft, not the Referrer header.

If they block Google, there's always a loophole...

[The MAZZTer]

There are a handful of pages that proxy to google... for example.

% without the underlying numbers are meaningless

[winkydink]

Specmanship at its finest.

duh

[Alien Being]

Google, unlike Microsoft, is a company which found success by providing the best product.

Re:duh

[OmnipotentEntity]

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.

Wow, that's surprising...

[QuantumG]

Usually it's Microsoft employees who are drinking the coolaid.

Re:Wow, that's surprising...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Usually it's Microsoft employees who are drinking the coolaid.

In Redmond, they don't call it coolaid. They call it dogfood. And for good reason.

Re:Wow, that's surprising...

[QuantumG]

koolaid (yes, I mispelt it) and dogfood are two different concepts. Ironicly, you to drink the koolaid is to be dogmatic whereas to eat the dogfood is to be pragmatic. You drink the koolaid to show you believe in the superiority of your product. You eat the dogfood because you recognise that your product is not perfect and hope that by using it daily you will see where improvements can be made. Either way, it seems Microsoft employees neither think their product is superior, nor recognise it as imperfect.. the former is surprising, the later is just what we've come to expect from them.

Re:Wow, that's surprising...

[CrazyJim1]

Um, I always thought drinking the koolaid refers to the cult mass suicide...

Re:Wow, that's surprising...

[QuantumG]

yes.............. and they're commiting suicide for what? To show that they have dogmatic belief in their leader.

Re:Wow, that's surprising...

[xiphoris]

Eating dogfood properly doesn't require doing it every day. I'm a Microsoft employee and I've used Live search exactly enough to report all the important bugs I feel exist. The number one thing that bugs me is that Live results don't appear instantly if you hit "back" from a clicked-on page to return to search results; the JavaScript appears to load it again from the server.

Beyond important feedback of that sort, one should always return to the product one prefers for development. My experience at MS is that employees use whatever they prefer: VIM, Emacs, Visual Studio are all in force. We encourage dogfooding to a great extent, but it's obviously never more important than having other teams legitimately get their work done. I work on Visual Studio, and while it disheartens me to hear some people might rather use VIM as their editor, one must be realistic and assume one's product cannot cater to all people. The best we can do is learn from existing software and how our clients (internal and external) want it to work and improve.

I have not heard anything about coolaid. Dogfood is a very different story.

Note: I am a Microsoft summer intern, so my views don't reflect those of MSFT and such. However, I must say it's generally a very positive atmosphere and beyond the dogfood aspect ("Help other teams test their products in real world scenarios") the culture seems supportive of "use whatever tools to get the job done". People are not fanatics nor blind. It has been a thoroughly positive experience so far :)

block it?

[PresidentEnder]

While it would fit with human nature if Microsoft blocked Google on their intranet, it makes more sense for Microsoft to use this in-house as a barometer of their own performance: if Google use falls, and Microsearch use rises, then they're succeding; if the opposite happens, then they're doing something wrong.

check the sample size

[Anonymous Coward]

The sample size, for this single person's site, is around ~500.

Hardly statistically adequate.

This is an attention grabbing fluff piece.

Re:check the sample size

[peterfa]

Actually, that's very statistacally adaquate, given that it's a random sample. The sample of the Microsoft company isn't randomly selected, and it wouldn't matter if that's a million people. It's a bad sample, but not because of it's size.

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.

Re:check the sample size

[adpowers]

My original sample was very small (maybe 20,000 hits in total, with only some of them being from the companies in question). However, Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped took a much larger sample and got similar results.

Of course, when you get your news from the fourth tier of information (one not particularly known for respectability in the first place), you are more likely to get some misinformation. In this case: my website->Google Blogoscoped (where more content was added)->Tech Web->The Inquirer.

Andrew

PS: This has gotten way more coverage than I ever imagined. First it was dugg and now slashdotted... wow.

Sample size of 45 users...

[Utopia]

... visiting via a search engine.

For a company with what about 50000 worldwide employees?

Hmm.

Re:Sample size of 45 users...

[aprilsound]

For a sample size of 50 with 95% confidence we can say that the margin of error is about 14%. (link if you doubt)

That's still looking pretty sad for Microsoft.

Re:Sample size of 45 users...

[Anonymous Coward]

...provided it's a *random* sample. Here what we're really saying is x% of people who read the Inquirer and work for Microsoft use Google. Maybe Google is just popular with Inquirer readers in general, or that people are more "successful" finding things on the Inquirer site if they use Google (i.e., the Inquirer does better search engine optimization for Google than for other search engines).

Re:Sample size of 45 users...

[swiftstream]

There are numerous problems with the analysis, including that there's no randomization, which makes any statistical inference to a broader population invalid anyway. Of course, journalists and such ignore this all the time. Even introductory college statistics textbooks sometimes make it seem OK to do inference when there's no randomization.

It may be, also, that this guy's site is ranked higher on Google than on MSN or Yahoo, which would make the proportion of MS employees coming from Google higher than the proportion which actually use Google regularly. This is called a lurking variable, and I'm too lazy to test it right now.

IAASM (I Am A Statistics Major)

Front Page News!

[adam31]

No, not really.

Why Slashdot would link an Inquirer story is beyond me. Maybe Slashdot is for entertainment purposes only, but "News for Nerds" ought to be supported by some attempt at Fact. The Inquirer is just a machine meant to cause a ruckus for the purpose of page hits... any ounce of partiality or balance of truth be damned if it detracts from the hit count.

Linking stories from the front page is just feeding it. It's not news.

Grain of salt

[megaditto]

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.

Re:Grain of salt

[Fordiman]

Wow. A Standard deviation of 192% means the results are meaningless for a range of 0-100% (the range itself is < 3x the std dev, the basic measure of 'significance' in statistics).

As a counterpoint

[The Bungi]

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?

the reason is

[arbi]

probably because it's the default search engine for Firefox :P

What they left out...

[saleenS281]

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.

Re:Bad, even for Slashdot...

[Lane.exe]

Your model is mostly correct, but I can't seem to find the ????? step in there anywhere. If reading Slashdot has taught me anything (and it's taught me many things), it is that no business model is EVER successful without the inclusion of the ????? step.

That's great, but...

[TJWitz]

all we need to know now is what % of google employees use a windows OS at google HQ. Merely to balance out the level of asinine statistics/articles in the world, naturally.

Re:I would still be using Google

[SpectreHiro]

... even if I had the chance to work in Microsoft. I know I don't!

Come on, little trooper... Don't be so hard on yourself. There's always janitorial positions.

What's the big deal?

[ianlee74]

I've had the opportunity to work with several Microsoft groups over the years in development projects and one thing that always impressed me about the insight that I got about the culture there is that they are always allowed to use the best tools available. Regardless of whether it's a Microsoft tool or one of their competitors, management doesn't care. The objective is always to empower their employees with the best tools available. Of course, this also allows them better insight into what their competition is doing and helps them focus on the tools that they need to improve upon. I seriously doubt that you'll see MS blocking google.com anytime soon...

On the other hand...

[Sathias]

Google employees probably use Microsoft's Operating Systems more than they do Google's ;)

Stats

[MarkByers]

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.

Re:I've recently been finding google to be worse

[I'm Don Giovanni]

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.

Most important flaw

[MarkByers]

There is a really obvious flaw in the way these statistics are being interpreted that everyone seems to be ignoring. There are other flaws too, which have been mentioned, but the most important flaw is that the sample selection is not random nor representative of employees of the companies.

The site owner openly admits that 80% of the hits come from Google. This could be because his site is rated highly in Google. That's fine.

But if most of the sites visitors are using Google, it is hardly a surprise that the percentage of people in Microsoft using Google as their preferred search engine is estimated too high. The employees that do not use Google are not getting counted because their preferred search engine rates his site lower.

the actual response...

[jwjcmw]

Just did a search on "Australia's laws on pedophilia"

The actual text of the message is:

"This query does not comply with Ask.com Terms of Service"

Re:the actual response...

[SirSlud]

"how to have sex with underage girls" succeeds.

"best places to have sex with young girls" succeeds.

"find sex with young kids" doesn't succeed.

"find sex with children" doesn't succeed.

"find sex with boys" succeeds.

"find sex with young girls" succeeds.

"sex kids" doesn't succeed.

"copulation kids" does succeed.

I think its the combination of words in a list 'sex' included in, and maybe some list, including 'kids' that fails.

Also, any search with the word "pedophilia" fails. Probably self-defense; search technology cannot make the distinction between linking to bad 'pedophilia is good' results and the far more common 'pedophilia is bad' results.

Re:the actual response...

[blamanj]

Disturbing. Oddly enough, their terms of service does not say "Ask has the right to create censorbots that restrict what you can see on the web.

However, if you look at their preferences page, you'll see two options, which essentially say "Filter content, but allow me to bypass the filter" and "Filter content silently". This appears to violate their implied contract, i.e., that you'll have a chance to see "adult" material once you acknowledge the filter.

Re:the actual response...

[jwjcmw]

And I noted that "pedophelia" (instead of "pedophilia") succeeds...and gives you the option on the side to narrow your search to "Preteen Girls Virgin"...so apparently the stuff they are protecting us (or them...whichever logic they are using) from is still there, you just have to know how to find it.

Re:the actual response...

[Martz]

Right.. because kidie porn web sites use the "pedophilia" and other related meta tags to draw visitors in? I don't think so.

If it was this easy, surely the law enforcement and child-protection agencies around the world would find the sites, take them down and prosecute the people running and visiting them.

For a keyword like pedophilia or similar, its as dangerous to block the genuine search results as it is bad ones.

If all of the search engines were like this, and if software products that "protect children on-line, on behalf of the parent" stop returning genuine search results, it might be very difficult for an abused child to get real help. Or find information about what to do if they've had unprotected sex, are being neglected etc.

An extreme example perhaps. "But won't someone think of the children!"

No they don't

[idonthack]

The vast majority of computers at Google are Linux boxes. They give us a laptop also, and we get to choose between a Mac Powerbook and an IBM Thinkpad.

Most people are Linux-only

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-15-n22 .html

Re:I would still be using Google

[adrianmonk]

... even if I had the chance to work in Microsoft.

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'd guess

[batura]

I'd guess that Microsoft may soon add google.com to the list of blocked URL's on their intranet."

I'd guess that you're an idiot then. There's no way that MS would block the most useful search tool on the internet just because they are trying to compete with it. I know its typical slashdot to believe in the MS culture of only their products are good, but I know plenty of MS employees that have Gmail accounts and was even contacted for recruiting through a Gmail account. And, another reason to keep searches open to google is to compare results from google to those obtained with Live.

Re:I'd guess

[DavidD_CA]

I couldn't agree more. Microsoft has frequently been a user of its competitors' products. Its webpages are full of Flash and PDF files, despite having competing technologies. And I highly doubt that their marketing department is forced to use Paint (or Photo Draw) and Publisher.

While I can see the need to require employees to use Outlook, Word, and Excel for collaboration, I highly doubt they would go much further than that.

Re:iPods and Google. Do they prefer PS3 too?

[mingot]

You do realize that the people who work there are just that... people. They are going to use whatever they think is the best tool for them, within reasonable limits. Since Apple makes the best mp3 player that's what the employees are going to spend the money on. Ballmer can throw as many chairs as he wants and that's not going to change. If the PS3 has the goods they'll have that. As long as Google is a better search engine it'll be used. But really, lets not kid ourselves about OO.

Use Your Competitors' Products

[ramakant]

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.

Just wait another 6 months

[ptaff]

• June 2005: Ballmer says "we'll catch up with Google in six months";
• December 2005: Ballmer says "we'll catch up with Google in six months";
• June 2006: your bet.

But Google workers prefer Microsoft, too.

[jbx]

Nearly anyone at Google who wants to write a long document uses Word. If they want to work on a spreadsheet, they launch Excel. And a presentation? PowerPoint.

And the predominant Google laptop? An IBM ThinkPad running Windows, with Office pre-installed.

Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) is the same.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

How to get the NSA at your door in 24 hours ?

[this great guy]

See parent post.

Re:How to get the NSA at your door in 24 hours ?

[kalirion]

I am appalled at your ignorance. The parent (well, grandparent for me) post will only succeed at getting the FBI at the door. The NSA doesn't care what you say online as long as you don't mention that you know someone who's a Muslim. And in that case they'll likely still let the FBI come get you. You know that whole information sharing deal and all that.

Some things MS can do...

[jkrise]

to make the problem go away!

Executive Summary : Microsoft employees searching via Google.

Affected platforms: All Windows versions, ALL Microsoft employees, Credibility, Quality, Public Image, Self-Respect.

Workarounds A new Service Pack will be sent to you. This will forward all external queries via Anonymiser. Microsoft Domain stats will be protected.

Mitigating factors 1. Mainstream media hasn't picked it up yet.
2. Slashdot readers don't care much... infact, a majority of the Slashdot crowd use Windows.
3. We don't care.

Full solution: A new search engine is being built. This will get it's results from Google and display it as an MSN offering, with our ads. Beta for this expected in a week's time!

Re:Some things MS can do...

[Jaruzel]

A new search engine is being built. This will get it's results from Google and display it as an MSN offering, with our ads. Beta for this expected in a week's time!

Update: The beta is now available at http://www.live.com/

ask and you shall receive

[Brietech]

Ask and you shall receive . . .just made it =) http://www-scf.usc.edu/~cfenton/flyingchairs.zip

Not Asking Anymore

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I was thinking about switching to Ask from Google. Now I'm not going to.

From the above, it's obvious that Ask is one of these companies that has either taken it upon itself to decide what is and what is not suitable information, or has simply kow-towed to hysterical tabloid pressure. In either case, its results are now all tainted with reasonable doubt.

Today the red flag word is pedophilia. What will it be tomorrow? Terrorism, drugs, abortion, homosexuality, evolution? What else are they censoring? Slippery slope 101. What happens when the next moral panic sweeps the American Bible Belt and the rest of us, the world over, have to put up with legitimate searches crippled by Ask's obsequious panderings to the whims of the mogul led ochlocrats?

Screw their search engine! A random site selection is of more use to me now. At least it indexes more pages.

this is so Not news!!!!

[drmancini]

According to the article this number is based on access statistics on one single web site ... how is this significant in any way? Is /. turning into a tabloid?

What the article doesn't say

[palndron]

Is that most of the searches are "jobs+open+Google"

Proof That Google Uses Yahoo

[schweitn]

The "fact" that 100% of Google employee's use their own product is simply not true. I've seen hits on my site from Google employees, where they came from the Yahoo search engine. I even blogged about it here.