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?"

Comments

Re:Uh, no?

[drakaan]

As an IT guy that mostly works on Microsoft-branded software, I continue to be amused that Google consistently indexes solutions for problems with MS products (including Microsoft's own content much of the time...even MSDN and KB articles) more handily than Bing.

I've taken the "Bing Challenge" yearly since I knew about it (three times, I think? four?). Granted, I search for stuff that most people don't, but I'm not all that worried about search results for the typical stuff...I'm interested in results for the stuff that's specific and hard to find. Things where you have to whittle down results by adding in error codes and parts of event log entries...Bing has lost every time when I've just used a recent real-world search term...sometimes less or less-relevant results, and sometimes no results at all, compared to getting me to the answer I needed.

That said, for the stuff K-12 students are likely to *need* to search for in a school environment, Bing is probably fine. It's a less-capable search engine in general, IMHO, but it's good enough for typical searches for "with no ads!!!" to be a reasonable selling point for schools.

Re:Search engines are a commodity

[squiggleslash]

Uh, what? Seriously?

Google almost never gives me anything remotely useful for rarer and non-trivial searches.

* Google will, almost always, rewrite the query to something it can find over a million search results for and then require you click on a link, easily missed, to get the query you actually had.
* On being told "No, I really wanted to search for ..." it will then ignore your search query and come up with anything related to one word in your query rather than the entire thing.

At this point, you end up sticking plusses and quotation marks in various combinations to try to get something (even a "There's nothing on the entire internet about this, sorry" message would be useful because then you can work on something else rather than plowing through irrelevent search results trying to find out if something obscure in one of those pages actually matches), and nine times out of ten, Google will still ignore the query and pretend you're not asking for what you're asking for.

Google is shit for rarer and non-trivial searches. Is it better than Bing anyway? Possibly, I've never spent long enough switched to Bing to evaluate it (yes, Bing is just as shitty in my experience), but quite honestly, pretending it's optimized for these kinds of queries in some way that Bing isn't suggests to me you haven't used it in ten years.

Bing is Google's equal. Neither are remotely as good as Google was five years ago.

Re:I tried it

[neminem]

I tried DuckDuckGo last year for a bit. I loved their philosophy, and I loved some of the enhancements they made to the whole search experience... but at least when I tried it, their actual search results were kinda crap. When I realized about 2/3s of the time I just ended up typing !google [search terms], I said screw it and went back to google.

I'd rather Google get all my searches and everything than Microsoft anyway, though. At least Google knows how to do useful things with all that data.

Re: As much as we love to hate Microsoft...

[SiChemist]

Nipped it in the BUD. And you used it incorrectly. It means, "to put an end to something before it develops into something larger."

-- Your friendly grammar nazi.