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Microsoft Workers Prefer Google

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Jun 21, 2006 10:06 PM
from the best-of-breed dept.
Microsoft Businesses Google The Internet IT
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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  • Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket (Score:5, Funny)

    by ClamIAm (926466) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:09PM (#15580234)
    Film at 11.
  • ...in search queries!!

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

    • Some things MS can do... (Score:5, Funny)

      by jkrise (535370) on Thursday June 22 2006, @02:24AM (#15580988) Journal
      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!

  • Most common search phrase (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:10PM (#15580240)
    free flying chair screensaver

  • I've switched (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:11PM (#15580244)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Petrushka (815171) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:32PM (#15580337)
      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.

      • the actual response... (Score:5, Informative)

        by jwjcmw (552089) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @11:19PM (#15580511)
        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... (Score:5, Informative)

          by SirSlud (67381) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @11:33PM (#15580550) Homepage
          "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.
          • See parent post.
          • 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.

        • Re:the actual response... (Score:5, Informative)

          by blamanj (253811) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @11:41PM (#15580578)
          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:I've switched (Score:5, Informative)

        by donscarletti (569232) on Thursday June 22 2006, @01:15AM (#15580843)
        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.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by viniosity (592905) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:11PM (#15580245) Homepage Journal

    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.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by killjoe (766577) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @11:58PM (#15580624)
      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.. (Score:5, Funny)

          by Waffle Iron (339739) on Thursday June 22 2006, @12:42AM (#15580756)
          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.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by incest (622529) on Thursday June 22 2006, @12:19AM (#15580687)
      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.. (Score:5, Funny)

        by plover (150551) * on Thursday June 22 2006, @12:45AM (#15580768) Homepage Journal
        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!

          • 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.
  • There are a handful of pages that proxy to google... for example [scroogle.org].
  • Specmanship at its finest.

  • Wow, that's surprising... (Score:4, Funny)

    by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:13PM (#15580253) Homepage Journal
    Usually it's Microsoft employees who are drinking the coolaid.

    • Re:Wow, that's surprising... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:21PM (#15580294)
      > 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... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:28PM (#15580323) Homepage Journal
        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... (Score:5, Informative)

          by xiphoris (839465) on Thursday June 22 2006, @01:29AM (#15580878) Homepage
          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? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PresidentEnder (849024) <wyvernender@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:13PM (#15580254) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:18PM (#15580275)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by adpowers (153922) on Thursday June 22 2006, @12:11AM (#15580658)
      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.

  • Sample size of 45 users... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Utopia (149375) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:18PM (#15580278)
    ... visiting via a search engine.

    For a company with what about 50000 worldwide employees?

    Hmm.

    • Re:Sample size of 45 users... (Score:5, Informative)

      by aprilsound (412645) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:27PM (#15580314) Homepage
      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.

      • Re:Sample size of 45 users... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by swiftstream (782211) on Thursday June 22 2006, @01:07AM (#15580829)
        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)

  • As a counterpoint (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Bungi (221687) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:27PM (#15580318) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by arbi (704462) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:32PM (#15580335)
    probably because it's the default search engine for Firefox :P

  • What they left out... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by saleenS281 (859657) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:34PM (#15580347) Homepage
    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.

  • What's the big deal? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ianlee74 (982977) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:49PM (#15580402)
    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... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sathias (884801) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:56PM (#15580427)
    Google employees probably use Microsoft's Operating Systems more than they do Google's ;)

  • Most important flaw (Score:5, Informative)

    by MarkByers (770551) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @11:18PM (#15580503) Homepage Journal
    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'd guess (Score:5, Insightful)

    by batura (651273) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @11:37PM (#15580563)
    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.

  • Use Your Competitors' Products (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ramakant (256472) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @11:50PM (#15580604)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by ptaff (165113) on Thursday June 22 2006, @12:20AM (#15580690) Homepage

    • Re:Bad, even for Slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lane.exe (672783) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @10:44PM (#15580380) Homepage
      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.

    • Re:iPods and Google. Do they prefer PS3 too? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mingot (665080) on Wednesday June 21 2006, @11:38PM (#15580568)
      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.

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