What if they gave an antitrust trial and nobody cared?
This week we scanned the Lycos search logs for evidence of web user interest in the U.S. vs. Microsoft antitrust trial. What we found: not much.
The top 50,000 queries included plenty of searches for Microsoft and various Microsoft products, but only two which specifically mentioned the trial: Microsoft monopoly and Microsoft antitrust. Those two got a few hundred searches between them; neither one got as many searches last week as Bill Gates house, that oddly persistent topic.
Microsoft antitrust got the same number of searches as did dandelions, Scott Baio, and Idaho State University -- none of them what you'd call a sizzlin' hot topic. And Microsoft monopoly got just slightly more searches than McDonalds Monopoly -- the fast food pull-tab game, that is.
In other words, people aren't searching like crazy for trial info. Let's toss in Netscape, since that company figures into things as an injured party, and see how searches for various corporate terms compare to each other. These are all based on user queries for the week ending April 22:
23.0% Microsoft
21.8% Netscape
17.7% Microsoft Windows
14.5% Internet Explorer
11.0% Netscape Navigator
06.1% Bill Gates
02.9% Netscape Communicator
01.4% MS-DOS
00.7% Bill Gates house
00.6% Microsoft monopoly
00.3% Microsoft antitrust
====
100% total
So: user searches for the two company names and their two browsers seem relatively even. Microsoft does get many thousands more searches each week for products not listed here: Word, Excel, Office, MSNBC, and so forth.
If you really want to talk monopoly, you should talk about Microsoft's e-mail service Hotmail. Add together all 11 terms above and they would still fall well short of the total searches for Hotmail last week. We get about 95 Hotmail searches for every one for Netscape's Webmail. Now that's unfair competition.
If Microsoft hoped that easing Bill Gates out of the CEO spot would lower his profile, it doesn't seem to have worked. He's still mighty popular, while his replacement Steve Ballmer didn't appear at all in our top 50,000 terms. Other no-shows included Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson and AOL czar Steve Case.
One spot does exist where Netscape leads Microsoft, and that's in the vital browser-to-SUV ratio. Searches for Netscape Navigator lead those for Lincoln Navigator by a ratio of 19-1, while Internet Explorer leads the Ford Explorer by a mere 7-1.
