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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?"
"Is this enough to beat the Google search quality edge?"
What does removing advertising and including privacy features have to do with "search quality"?
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
But worked very well for MS. (and a few others)
bickerdyke
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.