Slashdot Mirror
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."
Film at 11.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
free flying chair screensaver
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
The sample size, for this single person's site, is around ~500.
Hardly statistically adequate.
This is an attention grabbing fluff piece.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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)
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
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....
Ask and you shall receive . . .just made it =)
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~cfenton/flyingchairs.zip
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
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!