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Microsoft Pushing Bing For Search In Schools, With Ad-Removal Hook
rujholla writes "Microsoft has been trying to push Apple's iPad aside in favor of Surface tablets in schools, and now the Windows giant is looking to take on Google when it comes to search for students. Microsoft is including features such as allowing K-12 schools to remove advertisements from search results and enhanced privacy controls. Is this enough to beat the Google search quality edge? Or does that edge even still exist?"
I think this is a good thing. Sure its a marketing tactic, but its a good one. By removing ads and perhaps having a more education focused Bing, students will be able to search for what they want without as much noise. Hopefully Google will do the same if they aren't already.
I use Ixquick in firefox, along with NoScript, adblock plus and RequestPolicy. Do I miss something?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Is this enough to beat the Google search quality edge
Is this a joke?
Google is less likely to bring up unrelated articles when doing research. I'll suffer through ads for better content quicker.
Or better yet, use an ad-blocker.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Everyone knows this. The fact that they have to design a comparison website, AND, advertise it like a Pepsi Challenge...well...says a lot.
And I drink Pepsi, but I won't drink Bing.
Can't they set up adblock plus in chrome or firefox? Its really quite a nice plugin, and has been around for years.
"Is this enough to beat the Google search quality edge?"
What does removing advertising and including privacy features have to do with "search quality"?
Since this is US schools I don't think search quality will be that much of an issue. Bing is ok in US (sometimes Google is better, sometimes Bing, I think it is much down to individual preference as independent search relevance tests have them fairly equal), but the weird thing ruining the brand is that Bing doesn't really exist outside US (and partly UK and a few more large markets). In most of the rest of the world they just slapped the Bing logo on the old crappy MSN Search. You don't get the features, or the search quality, that was built and launched as the new Bing search engine in US.
Whatever advantage they had was quickly lost to the next wave of SEO. I barely get usable results from google searches anymore, and if I search for a new topic outside my usual bubble of personalized search, google's search engine shits itself and I get nothing but garbage.
In the Chinese, bing translates as "poison."
I'm just sayin'.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Studies show time and time again that there are marginal differences at best between the major search engines. Google has the majority share due to their brand name. If Microsoft can offer a product tailored for education, they can introduce other non-search engine products to profit from.
Google, with 97%+ of their revenue from advertising, doesn't have that luxury.
Bing lets you turn safe search off so you can see boobies!
Dumb old Google totally sucks.
I appreciate what Bing has brought to the table, but the reality is that young people and educators simply don't turn to Bing for search or, in the case of school, research. What the Bing engagement team might consider is that educators are driven in part by their passion, but also by their need to help young people understand specific subject content in a simple, efficient way. Google's search education team, and more specifically, the efforts that have yielded their search education curricula ( http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searcheducation/ ) , is fantastically helpful in that regard. Moreover, their team offers MOOCs, educator conversations and hangouts to clarify how search works. There are other, untapped opportunities that both engines could explore to essentially one-up one another in the education space (for example, how might LRMI integrate?). It would be a pleasure to learn that the Bing team has committed equal resources to developing quality lessons, interface options and community engagement. Alone, however, I don't believe that removing advertising and privacy control modifications are changes enough to make a sizable difference. --Dave
I mean this only in that they are focusing on the education market as a source for new users and making accommodations for them.
I'm not sure if it really worked though.
Can't they set up adblock plus in chrome or firefox?
I don't think Microsoft is allowed to do things that would jeopardize its relationship with advertisers on MSN.com and the like. Sure, Microsoft can give schools an ad-free subscription to a web site operated by Microsoft. But if Microsoft were to add functionality to strip advertisements from web sites that Microsoft does not operate, advertisers would likely retaliate by pulling their advertisements from Microsoft sites.
I don't know how Micro$oft marketing ever came up with that name. Whenever I hear it, I think of that useless machine in the operating/birthing room in the hospital at the beginning of Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life". The machine's only purpose was to go "BING".
That said, I don't think there's a search engine out there that I completely trust, but I usually use Google because a.) Yahoo is completely spam tolerant, and b.) I can't stand Micro$oft's attempt to force itself as the standard by virtue of volume.
At this point the only reason a prefer Google search is that I have Firefox configured to remove all advertising from Google. Until it's similarly easy to strip all advertising out of Bing it's just not worth looking at.
Jjust use https://duckduckgo.com
They even have an addon for most browsers.
No tracking either.
Their search result quality sucks so no, I would say it won't. I still do actually need to find what I'm looking for, which Bing never seems able to do.
Will they provide "Safe Search" type filtering for schools? It's widely accepted that Bing provides the best results for searching for porn on the internet.
I'm not trying to be funny, either... for whatever other faults people place on Bing, the porn aspect has to be the biggest obstacle to pushing it in schools.
I tried to use bing for a while, out of concern that google may know too much of me (already using gmail and calendar, at least my searches should go elsewhere). But the search results are just too bad, alas.
It appears that a troubled Steve Ballmer when and spoke with a longtime friend Mr Gates about his corporate troubles.
Gates appears to have suggested a strategy along the lines of putting their product in schools as being an old-time strategy that worked well...
Back in the day, MS was very present in my elementary, JR High and High schools with products and support.
you're a moron and you speak too much
Noise is unwanted random data existing amidst the resulting dataset. Google's ads are not noise, they are segregated and in a differently coloured box.
I actually propose an opposing idea. Students should be exposed to adverts, and they should be told they are adverts. They should learn from this and then learn to recognise the difference between data and adverts.
By keeping our learning lives ad-free we lose the stimulus that teaches us to identify the ads.
Hurr durr!!! Mocro$hapht sux!!1!1 all hale the googles!!!
I can just hear this now: "Hey, could you go BING that for me? I want to know how it's done..."
So the takeaway here is that Bing shouldn't try?
From thedailywtf.com no less.
'Nuff said?
Sarcasm- Thanks Microsoft. Schools are simply too stupid to roll out ad-blocking plugins, or filter at the proxy server. -/Sarcasm
Why would ad removal on the search engine be even slightly useful as a marketing hook?
Or, to rephrase the question, why would a school which gives a crap about kids seeing ads not already be running ad blocking software everywhere possible? It shouldn't be more complicated than a check mark in their existing porn/malware/Facebook filters...
Log in or piss off.
I remember when my school got free TVs so it could show a kids news program. It had about 5 minutes of ads before it started. At the time I thought it was pretty filthy to forcefully beam Coke commercials into student's brains (as we were not allowed to skip watching the program).
I always like to point out that in Scotland a Bing is a spoil heap, it's the pile of dirt that you take out of the ground and discard to get at the minerals you actually want, worst name for a search engine ever.
When has anyone ever said, "Bing it"?
There are quite a few ad remover extensions (in Microsoft-ese, "add-ons") for IE, although they aren't widely used relative to the browser's market share.
However, IE 9 and later (and 8 with enough finagling) include a feature called "Tracking Protection" ("InPrivate Filtering" on older versions) which is intended as a privacy enhancer, but works quite well as an ad-blocker too. By default, if you enable it in automatic mode, it will block any third-party request that it has seen across at least ten sites. Obviously, this rapidly catches all the major ad servers. The number of sites is configurable, and you can also manually block (or manually allow) specific sites or URLs. It's also easy to turn the filtering on or off for a given page; there's an icon which appears in the address bar when blocking something (or when something would be blocked but the blocking is disabled).
In addition, there are "Tracking Protection Lists" which you can subscribe to and which provide automatically updating block (or allow) rules for Tracking Protection. The automatic lists can be overridden by your personalized list, but they provide a good way to block tracking (or ads) before you see them at all. EasyList (makers of a popular AdBlock Plus list) offer a TPL, as do many others.
While less flexible than AdBlock Plus and its ilk (can't block ads hosted by the site you're actually visiting, for example; only third-party requests are blocked), it's a surprisingly effective fix that is built into one of the most widely used browsers.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Bing needs to create a different algorithm that filters results by credibility of topic. They also need to keep it educational; no Facebook, no Instagram, whatever.
It would be nice to see Bing set up access to university-level research.
Ad-Removal Hook won't help since their service and product is sub-par. Obviously, Microsoft doesn't see it that way though.
Advertisers keep telling us profiling is done only to bring us more relevant search results. If this was true, then wouldn't removing ads lower the quality of the search results?
Not at all! I hope that they try, try hard, and succeed! Bing is a fantastic service. My point is that it will take more than the removal of ads to make it happen, though.
In the olden days, I tried using search engines to improve my life, but none was a positive influence before I tried Google. Until the forces of darkness perpetrated SEO on the internet, the results were uncannily prescient, and on occasions when I tried the competition I found them unintuitive and the results worthless.
Nowadays, I occasionally find Google quite useless as the wanted data has been obfuscated by commercial interests, but Bing seems to be the same with the few useful results stripped out.
Now something about my Poa pratensis...
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I agree, pixelating those images is kinda droll.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.