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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."
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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.
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.
There are a handful of pages that proxy to google... for example.
Specmanship at its finest.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
The sample size, for this single person's site, is around ~500.
Hardly statistically adequate.
This is an attention grabbing fluff piece.
... visiting via a search engine.
For a company with what about 50000 worldwide employees?
Hmm.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
probably because it's the default search engine for Firefox :P
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.
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.
IAALS.
... 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.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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...
Google employees probably use Microsoft's Operating Systems more than they do Google's ;)
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
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).
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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...
yes.............. and they're commiting suicide for what? To show that they have dogmatic belief in their leader.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
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"
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
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.
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.
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.
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
See parent post.
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!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
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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.
May the Maths Be with you!