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January 5, 2005

Survey Says: Google Workers Use Google 100 Percent!

In What Search Engines Do Search Engine Companies Use?, Nathan at InsideGoogle provides stats from Visitorville Intelligence showing what top search engines are used by those who work at particular search engines after being tipped to the service by Google Blogoscoped. Those at Google apparently use Google 100 percent of the time. Those at Yahoo use Yahoo 69 percent of the time, followed by Google 30 percent of the time.

Visitorville collects the information by mining referer data provided by those who use its web analytics service. That's similar to what WebSideStory's StatMarket has long done. Some background on search related releases from that company can be found here.

The problem with mining referer information is that it can be skewed by the sites actually involved. There's no guarantee that the sample using Visitorville reflects the sample from across the web. And frankly, the idea that 100 percent of Google employees use Google leaves me wondering about the data. I mean, 99 percent, sure -- but a pure 100 percent?

Nevertheless, you can have fun playing around looking at stats for companies via the Visitorville Intelligence site itself. Other interesting stats are things like Most Fanatical Users Of Google, which shows those on Comcast Cable using it the most. That doesn't mean Comcast employees use Google the most, of course -- but more likely that those accessing the web through Comcast are big Google users.

Want to discuss? We've got a forum thread going here: Should Yahoo employees search elsewhere?

Posted by Danny Sullivan on January 5, 2005 10:11 AM