of course, the last one is questionable and I think they search more on competitors than in Google to see if it goes right.
it can t be sooo true...

It would be pretty pathetic if 0% of people at Google ever looked at their competition.

yes, thats questionable.. if you resolve the Corporation via IP number. then certaintly Googlers (google employees) must be testing thier results via other search engines.

To do emperical analysis they would not to 'glup' other SERP too. This will certainly consit of at least a small percentage of search with MSN /Yahoo/Rocket /ASK etc etc...

Maybe Google blocks other search engines, like in your QML?

http://digg.com/technology/Which_Search_Engines_are_Used_By_Microsoft_Google_Yahoo_Apple_EMPLOYEES

Well lets see what the Diggers think of these Stats

With the results from only one site, there is, as the author admits, a large margin of error. What is being measured is not what search engines people used total in those companies, but which ones they used to get to the specific site. I think that may make these results more significant though, because it is more likely to measure which search engines are used for personal use, not for reasearch.

Yeah, Chris, it could be personal use or research. I still remember when MSN was cutting a video of virtual maps.. they had some issue and one of the team actually said "google that information" in the video.. that was pretty funny.. yes it was not edited.. ..!!

Chris:
> to get to the specific site

Chris, VisitorVille Intelligence results are collected from many, many sites...

It's simply not a question of every single employee at Google using Google search.

Rather, all employees are just one single brain, and that brain only uses Google.

Like the borg.

Or the end boss of Metroid.

You get it.

I have heard that even ex IE security boss prefered Firefox.

Chris, interestingly, most of these people came to my website for research.

For Microsoft, the hits were overwhelmingly to my article about BigTable. 33 of the visitors came from a search engine using a BigTable term. A couple more came looking for topics that any rich executive would be interested in: [key arena, suite] or [indoor antenna hdtv seattle belltown].

For Yahoo, all of the organic hits went to my BigTable article (although, some were looking for information about BMDiff, not BigTable specficially). Is http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ considered a search engine (its more a social site, right? 'cause searching redirects me to http://search.yahoo.com/)? In either case, I got 3 hits from Yahoo employees there. I also got 3 hits from their internal wiki (going to BigTable) and 2 from their internal bug database (not sure to where).

For Google, they were searching for Google properties and for personal reasons. I got 12 hits for people searching for variations of [google widgets]. I got a few other hits of note: [bigtable read modify write] (shouldn't they have internal APIs for that?), ["blue man group" "bathroom song" lyrics], [thesex], ["rob+corddry"+gay]. It seems Googlers search for the most non-work related items.

Andrew

There are search engines other than Google?

my girlfriend tells my that google requires their employees to use google. i have not been able to find anything to back this up though.

100% doesnt seem to high...
if numbers are rounded.

In fact, it would be be surprising if 1% of searches were for another engine.
1% = 1 out of every 100 searches, that's a lot!
I'd expect it to be 1 in every 1000 searches, if not less...
Just think it's round numbers... then you realize the stats are not that much questionable.

Here's the difference:

Microsoft is not JUST a search/web company. I think we can agree that Google's search is known and popular among all Google employees. The same thing can be said for Yahoo, but to a slightly less amount because they have a wide range of services, much wider than Google. The wideness increases with Microsoft with hardware, OS, etc. So, they're much more likely to use Google at Microsoft if they aren't working in the search field, which few Microsoft employees are.

WHen i worked for BT Yahoo Broadband, as habit in tech Support, all agents told their customers to go to google, if they needed to check if the internet was working. The reason was because it loaded faster then yahoo. We were partnered with Yahoo, and were told one day to stop telling people to use google, and to use Yahoo instead. Most people did for about a week and then went back to using google.

I've noticed a large number of Microsoft employees using Google to get to my site myself, all those tide???.microsoft.com hosts. For every search.msn.com referral there are 15 from Google. I get too few Yahoo people (corp.yahoo.com, I guess) to make any sense of it. Mostly Google, sometimes Yahoo. Google employees use Google exclusively to get to my site, although there aren't so many hits from them either.

In statistics, 100% doesn't refer to every single instance. There's always a margin of error and a rounding factor due to significant figures and the like. For example, if at the amusement park, I make 1 out of 10000 ring tosses, it is safe to assume that the chances making the shot on any given throw is 0%... just as it is safe to assume that the chance of making 10000 in a row is 0%. Probably, the chances are more like .0001% but that's too slim a figure really, unless extreme precision is needed. In statistics such as these, it is the general idea that matters, not the tiny percentage differences. There's a huge difference between 63% and 0%.

In a lot of sites the Google search engine is also build in. This happens a lot less with MS SE & Y SE. That can be one of the reasons of this figures too. I do not think they are too unrealistic.

InformationWeek covered this now:

<<Most Microsoft Workers Search With Google

....

Andrew Hitchcock, a 19-year-old student at the University of Washington, got the ball rolling by posting Google Analytics statistics on visitors to his Web site. Of the users originating from Microsoft's domain who reached Hitchcock's site via a search engine, 80 percent came through Google. Only 20 percent used a Microsoft search engine (either MSN's or the Live.com's).>>
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189501002

Philipp, the story is everywhere now. E.g. on this belgian website: http://www.nl.datanews.be/news/enterprise_computing/20060621005 .

If this is the case than Google employees don't know how to search well, any serious searcher knows you need to use more than one search engine..