What Search Engines Do Search Engine Companies Use?
Google Blogoscoped links to Visitorville’s stats on persons from particular companies. Basically, VisitorVille is a service that tracks visitors to a particular website (and has some very cool ways of doing it). It now has a public area for general stats on all of its member sites called VisitorVille Intelligence, including one area that has stats on visitors from particular companies.
So, what search engine do Google employees use? Not surprisingly, 100% of them use Google. 68% of Googlers use Internet Explorer, with 21% using a Mozilla-based browser, while 84% of Google has Windows XP, compared with 5% for Linux. 16% of Googlers can’t use Gmail, because they won’t enable JavaScript, which is triple the number of regular netizens who have taken that measure. Interestingly, 62.5% of Google uses extreme resolutions of 1280×1024 or higher, with the plurality of 37.5% using 1600×1200. (No one uses 640×480.) They must have good monitors at the Googleplex.
Meanwhile, Apple employees use Google 87.5% of the time, with 10% going to Yahoo. 68.8% use Safari, 12% use IE. 73% at Apple use MacOSX (4.6% use MacPPC), while just over 8% run Windows (slightly more Win2000 than WinXP).
While MSN does better at Microsoft than elsewhere (19.6% compared to 10.23% among the general public), Google is still tops, at 66.31% (Yahoo falls to 10%). 98.75% of Microsoft employees use Internet Explorer, while the .6% who use Firefox are just awaiting their severance checks :-). The top 5 OSs at MS are all Windows, with them being, in order: WinXP, 79.21%; WinME, 8.32%; Win98, 7.30%; WinNET, 2.63%; and Win2000, 2.13%. The only other OS? MacOSX, with 0.09%, probably on a single system installed inside Bill Gates’ personal toilet bowl.
Finally, at Yahoo, 68.9% of employees use Yahoo, but a still-strong 29.8% use Google (compare that to Google’s 100% loyalty). 81.2% use IE (13% some form of Mozilla). Only 4% of Yahoo’s computers run Linux, and that’s only market share stolen from Windows 98, not any of the newer versions.
What’s the message? Nothing shows problems quite like companies that have products so unpopular that their own employees use don’t them. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples I didn’t point out, but if Yahoo can’t get all of its employees to use Yahoo like Google can, then how passionate are their workers about search? You shouldn’t work at Yahoo if you want to use Google. You should feel your product is the best, or you should find another job.
Postscript - While I was collecting the data for this post, I received an in-site chat request from Robert, the “mayor” of VisitorVille. It was a dialog that said “A website representative wishes to chat with you. OK / Cancel”. Normally, I would click cancel and assume it was spyware, but something possessed me to click OK. I wound up chatting with Robert, and it looks like I’ll now have VisitorVille stats for this blog. I know what I’m like, and I know that if I like it I’ll wind up sounding like I’m shilling for them (like I do with Findory), so please forgive me. I’ve always wanted to try VisitorVille (blame Philipp Lensen for that), now I get the chance, and I’ll be able to review the product for everybody.
Oh, and if you get a strange dialog on Blog News Channel that requests a chat, click OK. I won’t bite. Much. 
>>You shouldn’t work at Yahoo if you want to use Google. You should feel your product is the best, or you should find another job.
You are getting siller.. aren’t you
Comment by z | January 4, 2005
Keep this service free. Check out these advertisers and see what they have to offer.
On http://intelligence.visitorville.com/index.php
hehe.. he’s begging to be booted off Adsense. A big no-no on Adsense TOS. Can’t you do something for it, Nathan?
Comment by z | January 4, 2005
I’m not really sure what you just said. Care to elaborate?
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | January 4, 2005
62.5% of Google uses extreme resolutions of 1280×1024 or higher, with the plurality of 37.5% using 1600×1200. (No one uses 640×480.) They must have good monitors at the Googleplex.
Who ever uses 640×480 should be shot… Well unless they are someone’s grandmother.
Comment by Scott | January 4, 2005
I’m not so sure you can take the Yahoo! results as a sign that Yahoo employees don’t have faith in their own company. Isn’t it possible that some of the domain traffic is people testing Yahoo!’s SE results vs. Google’s?
I’d very much doubt any survey that said that 100% of Google employees are using Google. I can’t see how they wouldn’t once in a while want to pop open Yahoo! or MSN results to see what they came up with.
Comment by Tom | January 4, 2005
Testing the other engine would never take up 30%. In fact, it would be statistically insignificant, resulting in 100%. The numbers may not be perfect, but they still tell a story. One where 30% of Yahoo employees have little confidence in their own product.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | January 4, 2005
“Statistically insignificant, resulting in 100%”?
I would believe these stats if 99.X% of Google’s traffic was using Google. But 100%? That means no one from Google ever uses any other engine, and I don’t buy that. I think Google probably has some neat outbound proxying tricks that are skewing these stats and making it look like they never check any other engine. I’d be willing to bet they are very well aware of the results that Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines are putting out.
Testing would be significant for all these stats. For example, the 0.09% of users at Microsoft using Mac OS X could easily be people doing the Mac OS X ports of Office. The Windows users at Apple are probably people benchmarking Mac OS X components vs. Windows - Safari vs. IE, .mac tools, iTunes & iPod ports on Windows, SAMBA testing, etc.
My point is that I don’t think you can draw conclusions about company loyalty from these statistics.
Comment by Tom | January 5, 2005
Come on.
Given that Yahoo!’s only had a search engine business for the last year, 70% starts to sound pretty good. Remember that two years ago almost 100% of people at Yahoo! we’re using Google as well.
It’s also worth noting that while the majority of Google’s business is search, Yahoo!’s got a whole lotta people working on the other 90% of the site…
Comment by nathan | January 6, 2005
I’m not really seeing the same thing as you must be seeing. To me, the very best that the visitorville data provides is a very limited number of tracked hits for sourced IP numbers. (From the provided percentages, it’s also not a really large population either.) It’s not employees doing searches, it’s searches originating from those IP blocks that have resulted in a click through. While that may include employees, it also includes public machines that may be part of that owned set of IP blocks.
Plus, there’s not enough information provided about these numbers for any real, indepth read of what they mean. Surely the margin of error being triple digit (even against the undefined “baseline”) would be questionable at best in any serious study.
I think saying that this proves Google employees blind-sighted faithfulness to their own engine purely from this data is like saying that everyone who works there is a native english speaker because most of the sites they visit are in english.
Comment by jr | January 6, 2005
I work for a metasearch perperty and I can tell you without a doubt in my mind that all of the data from VisitorVille is made up. It’s blatent - flat out - BS. First, no one has ever even heard of VisitorVille. Second VisitorVille has now claimed that they can distinguish between “test” searches by search engine employees and “real” searches. This is an outright LIE. There is no possible way for VisitorVille to determine the difference between a “test” or “real” search. As someone who knows search technology inside and out I would challenge VisitorVille to provide quotes from anyone at Google, Yahoo!, or any other engine to verify VisitorVille’s claims! Unless each employee of a search engine had software on their machine that reports test and real searches to VisitorVille then there is no other way to collect and distinguish between that data. This whole thing is a FARCE!
Comment by Joe Holcomb | January 7, 2005
Statistics are always easy to develop to prove you point. I’m more interested in the disclaimer. Especially when I see 100% at google. Everyone is a little curious to see their competitors and do a search on their site
Comment by Rob Clark | January 7, 2005
Those statistics are very inaccurate please check with the real player in the industry like Statmarket (WebSideStory) who track more than 30 million visitors per day on the web. That’s reliable - not Visitorville. Shame!
Comment by Pierre Huguet | January 7, 2005
Those statistics are very inaccurate please check with the real player in the industry like Statmarket (WebSideStory) who track more than 30 million visitors per day on the web. That’s reliable - not Visitorville. Shame!
Comment by Pierre Huguet | January 7, 2005
Joe:
Have you gone to VisitorVille’s website and seen what their product does? I’ve been using it the last four days. VisitorVille is simply a highly advanced tool for collecting and examining site log data. I see, in the people arriving to my site, Google employees, Microsoft employees, and Yahoo employees. And I see what search engines they arrive by and by what keywords. It is easy to collect this data, as VisitorVille has done.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | January 7, 2005
First question, do you use HighBeam and second, what’s wrong in trying to know your competitors?
Comment by theglobalchinese | January 7, 2005
It seems to me that google goes to very great pains to put on an appearance that google is number one. I think that anyone caught using any other search engine at google would likely have their free lunch taken away as well as their wireless mouse and keyboard. After all if even 1% were using another search the report wouldnt say 100% Google. But then again maybe they have all been assimilated. Hmm. Google Borgs.
Comment by Professor Psy Dye | January 7, 2005
Very honestly speaking, this data is kind of made up. 81.2% of yahoo employees use IE? Give me a break, most Yahoo employees dont use Windows at all, they are using FreeBSD/Linux. Only part of HR and marketing people use Windows. SO you can know how wrong this number is. It’s really a shame to make up some number to catch other’s ball in order to sell product.
Fairly speaking, this is rather a marketing trick rather than a serious technology.
Comment by bullshit | January 8, 2005
I´m not sure if I buy this 100% for google ,somebody would/ must have used another search engine whilst at google.
Yahoo 70%, now that to me sounds realistic ..
I´d believe my employees were doing their jobs properly if they were using competitor´s facilities at least 1/3 of the time .
Google are upto some figure /stats manipulation (AGAIN ! )
Comment by taxidriver | January 9, 2005
Statistically speaking, upwards of 70-75% of statistics are fabricated (90% of the time) ….
Comment by BiggBioDiesel | January 14, 2005
[…] VisitorVille now offers a free version of its site visitor tracking software. It may not have all the features of the paid version, but its worth checking out. I got to demo the full software back in January, and its both fun and useful. (via Blogoscoped) Posted: 9/2/2005 by Nathan Weinberg in: […]
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Wow!!! Good job. Could I take some of yours triks to build my own site?
Comment by Anna | July 27, 2006