02 December 2007

OOXML: Google search engine supports IBM FUD campaign ?

IBM's Rob Weir recently created a blogpost on the use of Office Open XML files in the real world. Strangely enough he uses the Google search engine searching the web to prove dat OOXML is not really used in the world. Is this because he understands that ODF is really more semi w3c webformat than a serieus Office format? A more respectable way to look at Office documents would be to ask companies using Office software but apperantly IBM thinks differently. But it get even Weirder.

In his blogpost Rob find uses the Google search engine to determine that there is less than 2,000 Office Open XML files available on the internet compared to 160,000 ODF files. That is interesting because it is totally ridiculous. The numbers by Google do not add up at all as it shows no increase in OOXML files at all and just looking at them made me very suspicious. I tried a similar search of docx files using the Live search search engine:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=contains%3Adocx&mkt=us-us (69,000)
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=contains%3Apptx&mkt=us-us (41,000)
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=contains%3Axlsx&mkt=us-us (14,000)

An example of this Google blindness for instance this link:http://blogpictures.members.winisp.net/saas.pptx which at this time can be found trough Live search and trough Yahoo search but not trough Google search.

So where Rob using Google can not find more than 2,000 actual Office Open XML files I can easily find 124,000 pages that contain one or more Office Open XML files.

It becomes easy to manipulate the figures when Google is on your side ?