Late last fall, SearchNetworking.com presented 1800 readers with a survey of more than 175 networking products and/or product families, divided into 12 categories. The categories and product lists were determined by SearchNetworking.com editors, who polled vendors across the networking industry asking them which of their products should be included. Survey respondents were asked to select the products that they use, and to rate each product according to six to eight different criteria that varied depending on the product. Each criterion was assigned a weighted value based on its importance, so that more prominent capabilities would have more impact on the final evaluation.

For each criterion, respondents scored the product on a scale of one (poor) to five (excellent). They also had the ability to indicate that they had "no opinion."

"Vote protection" was instituted in our survey analysis. To prevent any one person or company form "stuffing the ballot box," IP addresses of survey respondents were collected and screened. Only the first survey response from a particular IP address was included in our data.

Winners were based on cumulative responses achieved by calculating each product's average weighed score. Editors arrived at this number by multiplying the number of points a product received in each area by the weight of the criterion. This was totaled, then divided by the number of responses for that product, giving the average weighted score.

In each product category, the highest average weighted score received the gold medal, the next highest the silver, and the third highest bronze. Vendors were only eligible to win one award per category. To prevent products that received a very small number of high scores from unduly influencing the results, a product had to receive a minimum of 15 responses to be eligible to win.