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."

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.

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

[The MAZZTer]

There are a handful of pages that proxy to google... for example [scroogle.org].

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.

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 [isixsigma.com] if you doubt)

That's still looking pretty sad for Microsoft.

Is that a surprise to you? :-/*

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you haven't been on Slashdot too long. There's not much fact here; just entertainment for fanboys of LUNIX...err, Linux [att.com] and The Simpsons [jumptheshark.com].

If you're looking for facts, turn to USA Today [usatoday.com]. If you're looking at venting some immature prepubescent frustration, come to Slashdot. You'll be welcomed with open arms.

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...

What a Microsoft employee told me

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently visited a Microsoft facility in Redmond when the subject of search engines came up. One employee told me that they were "supposed to try MSN search first, but..." in a tone of voice that implied that they all just go straight to Google.

Come on. Can you blame them?

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:Wow, that's surprising...

[QuantumG]

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

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 [ask.com] 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 [ask.com], 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:check the sample size

[adpowers]

My original sample [andrewhitchcock.org] 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 [outer-court.com] 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.

Re:As a counterpoint

[ThousandStars]

There was actually a poll a few years back asking people what OS they used and another asking about browsers. I believe at one point the editors did break out the numbers and showed that something like a bit more than half of all hits came from Windows machines. Some observers said that they don't get a choice of OS from work. Others said that /. has, despite its origins, actually become a polytheistic site WRT to OSes.

Just wait another 6 months

[ptaff]

• June 2005: Ballmer says "we'll catch up with Google in six months" [zdnet.com.au];
• December 2005: Ballmer says "we'll catch up with Google in six months" [bink.nu];
• June 2006: your bet.

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: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.

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 :)

Re:I wouldn't do it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=msdn [google.com]

8. Seattle, WA, USA

Point of order...

[garumphul]

I think it's worth pointing out, purely for accuracy, that you're talking about "paedophiles" (with an "ae" ligature) rather than "pedophiles". One likes children, the other likes feet. Hence "pedometer" refers to how many footsteps you have taken, not how many kiddies you have fiddled. Use of "pedo" rather than "paedo" is a fairly recent corruption.

Just thought I'd make the point. I worry about all those poor innocent(-ish) foot fetishists getting lynched. The have a hell of a time already... remember the great patent leather famine of '03?

Re:Point of order...

[vidarh]

Foot fetishism is "podophilia".

Re:No they don't

[kjart]

Based on the stats this article is based on they're mostly windows (72 out of 74 are Windows): http://andrewhitchcock.org/companystats/ [andrewhitchcock.org] (someone linked to this above).

I'd guess that shows how accurate these stats are.

Re:Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket

[CastrTroy]

Seriously, as a web developer, I couldn't see how one could get by without Google and Firefox. Firstly, Google groups is where I find 80% of my answers, then 15% from google web search, and then maybe 5% from asking co-workers. It usually takes less or about the same time to google something, plus, i'm not interupting someone else and taking up their time. Secondly, Firefox with it's web developer tool bar is a godsend. I know one exists for IE, but it's not as good. I also find that FF gives better descriptions of javascript errors, along with the color coded source code view, which makes Firefox about 10 times easier to use for web development.

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?

Re:Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) is the same.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we all know this. We do work in a Search company you know (as I already stated).

The problem is Ask.com doesn't index technical data like Google does. One of the largest missing pieces in the index is the MSDN as one small example.

While alot of us do feel Ask is *better* than google at general life questions, it is horrible at technical queries.

This leads us to having to think about what we will be searching for and deciding which search engine to use before typing in http://ask.com/ [ask.com] or google.com

It's much easier to just type Google.com and have it all.

Google is like the jack-of-all trades, Good at everything but GREAT at nothing. Ask is GREAT at a certain segment of searches and unfortunetly poor at others.

I think this is why Ask is the backup-search engine for most people. When and if Google's jack-of-all trades approach fails, try out Ask's search engine.

They are working on the problem though, it is technically challenging to expand the index to include alot more types of information and remain relevant, but they are working very hard on it and I hope they continue to innovate in the search space as they have been and give Google a run for their money.

Bill Gates recently said in a conference that Ask is the only company doing true innovation in search for real people. It's funny you'd think he'd say that about his own MSN search.

Re:Google MSN

[SphericalCrusher]

Create a website and throw some meta tags in it and watch how fast it jumps up on the search pages. I've tested this.

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 [nickschweitzer.net].