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I recently came across this chart of the results of a survey of IT decision makers and influencers about where they look for information when evaluating technology solutions.
I have long believed that Google is the most important tool to IT when researching products and solutions. It has been that way for me ever since I first heard of Google in 1998. "Google" has become a verb in IT, so this is not surprising. Many in the tech industry accept this as fact, and just as many are very skeptical of the importance of a search engine in the IT decision making process.
I am curious of how readers of the Citrix blog would vote in such a survey. What is your most important research tool when looking for information on new technology solutions?
UPDATE:Thanks for voting in this poll. appreciate so many of our readers taking a moment to share your thoughts with us.
Where do you look first for information on technology solutions?
Good point. I use Wikipedia a great deal for research as well (and it is often in the top the search engine listings). I will check to see if I can add in another choice without wiping out the current results.
Agreed -- I almost always start on Wikipedia, then continue the search using the Wiki footnote links. After that, Google -- and lastly, the web page of the solution itself.
I went ahead and added WikiPedia as an option to vote. Since that worked, I thought I could get away with dividing IT Vendor Web site into two choice - IT Vendor Product web Site and IT Vendor Support web site. Unfortunately that change wiped out the original votes for vendor web site.
I am trying to determine if there is a way to allow multiple votes. After doing a google search ( ) it appears that we are using the simple vote macro on Confluence which does not offer this option. i will keep digging.
Well if you type like I do you would use Google too. I type in a company /manufacturer name there seeing as most companies rarely have the opportunity to just usethiername.com then I go to the site and check out what it is where to get it and what there is for competition.
The results of the poll have been very interesting. I am not surprised Google is the leader by a large margin, but it is the percentage for Google is not nearly as large as the quoted survey. My guess is a big part of that is the limitations of our vote macro, which does not allow multiple votes per response (I will use PollDaddy for all future polls).
Search engines (Google, Yahoo and Live combined) get 39% of the vote. According to Wordtracker, the term "citrix" gets searched in Google 444 times per day, 127 times per day in Yahoo, and 55 times a day in MSN Live. This order lines up with our survey as well.
I am very curious about the other factors used in making technology decisions. I will ber posting more polls about this. Thanks for all the votes!
Posted by Anonymous
at 
) it appears that we are using the simple vote macro on Confluence which does not offer this option. i will keep digging.
Okay, own up, who voted for MSN Live?