Microsoft Workers Prefer Google
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jun 21, 2006 10:06 PM
from the best-of-breed dept.
from the best-of-breed dept.
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)
(http://xenu.net/)
Re:Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Chair sales in Redmond skyrocket (Score:4, Interesting)
Steve Ballmer is going to bury google... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://gmail.com/)
Some things MS can do... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday August 22 2005, @11:02AM)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.mattowen.com/)
Update: The beta is now available at http://www.live.com/ [live.com]
Most common search phrase (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Most common search phrase (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.creimer.ws/ | Last Journal: Friday January 26 2007, @12:40PM)
Re:Most common search phrase (Score:4, Informative)
Amazing that no one on the internet has actually made such a screensaver.
ask and you shall receive (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Most common search phrase (Score:5, Funny)
(http://theanalogkid.net/)
I've switched (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I've switched (Score:5, Interesting)
the actual response... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
(http://www.sirsonic.com/)
"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... (Score:4, Insightful)
How to get the NSA at your door in 24 hours ? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How to get the NSA at your door in 24 hours ? (Score:4, Funny)
Not Asking Anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://obsessivemathsfreak.org/ | Last Journal: Friday June 09 2006, @08:15PM)
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)
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)
(http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cmoore/)
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)
(http://www.urbanpuddle.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 02 2006, @10:31PM)
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:4, Funny)
Re:I wouldn't do it.. (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 18 2004, @07:52AM)
Re:I wouldn't do it.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I wouldn't do it.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't do it.. (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 12 2007, @09:41AM)
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"....
Wha? What are you doing here? Get off my lawn, you damn kids!
Re:I wouldn't do it.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I wouldn't do it.. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://obsessivemathsfreak.org/ | Last Journal: Friday June 09 2006, @08:15PM)
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.
If they block Google, there's always a loophole... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://blog.mzzt.net/)
% without the underlying numbers are meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.networkmirror.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 05, @04:34PM)
Re:Grain of salt (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.elflord.net/ | Last Journal: Monday March 19 2007, @10:35AM)
duh (Score:3, Funny)
Re:duh (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.nerdparadise.com/)
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... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
Re:Wow, that's surprising... (Score:5, Funny)
In Redmond, they don't call it coolaid. They call it dogfood. And for good reason.
Re:Wow, that's surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
Re:Wow, that's surprising... (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 06 2005, @10:30PM)
Re:Wow, that's surprising... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
Re:Wow, that's surprising... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.xiphoris.com/)
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)
(Last Journal: Tuesday July 31, @12:06PM)
check the sample size (Score:5, Informative)
Hardly statistically adequate.
This is an attention grabbing fluff piece.
Re:check the sample size (Score:5, Informative)
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)
For a company with what about 50000 worldwide employees?
Hmm.
Re:Sample size of 45 users... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://jroller.com/page/noah)
That's still looking pretty sad for Microsoft.
Re:Sample size of 45 users... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:I would still be using Google (Score:4, Funny)
Come on, little trooper... Don't be so hard on yourself. There's always janitorial positions.
Re:I would still be using Google (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Front Page News! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Bad, even for Slashdot... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait... I have an idea!
1.) Write anti MS blog entry with lots of unsubstantiated or specious claims.
2.) Place tons of AdSense ads on it.
3.) Submit it to Slashdot.
4.) Sit back and watch the cash flow in!
Re:Bad, even for Slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)