June 21, 2006

According Web metrics and analytics company VisitorVille Intelligence, surprisingly, when searching the Internet about 80 percent of Microsoft workers do it with Google instead of MSN.

VisitorVille say only about 20 percent used a Microsoft search engine, either MSN or the Live.com engine.

Reportedly, a 19-year-old student named Andrew Hitchcock at the University of Washington initiated this story by posting Google Analytics statistics on visitors to his blog. Of the users originating from Microsoft's domain who reached his site via a search engine, an overwhelming 80 percent came through Google.

Overall, employees of Google and Yahoo were far more loyal to their own search engines than Microsoft ever was. Of the Google visitors, 100 percent used their own search engine. About 64 percent of Yahoo personnel used Yahoo. The remainder also used Google.

Hitchcock's findings were in line with more formal statistics gathered by visitor analytics vendor VisitorVille Intelligence. According to the Shepherdstown, a W.V.-based company, a little over 66 percent of Microsoft users turn to Google for Internet search. Only 19.6 percent use MSN. And about 10.2 percent went to Yahoo for their searching.

Google-centric blogger Philipp Lenssen dug even deeper into the VisitorVille Intelligence data, and posted the results on his blog. By Lenssen's count, Yahoo workers used their own engine 68.9 percent of the time, Google's 29.8 percent of the time.

Lenssen matched Hitchcock's take on Google: 100 percent of Google workers stuck with their own technology.

The numbers shouldn't be too surprising, since Google has half of the search business in the U.S.

According to the most recent numbers published by Nielsen/NetRatings, Google has 50 percent of the market. Number two is Yahoo and number three is Microsoft's MSN, which accounted for 22 percent and 11 percent of the market, respectively.

Source: Tech Web