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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?
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"?
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.
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.
>Studies show time and time again that there are marginal differences at best between the major search engines.
What planet are you living on?
The only 'studies' showing this are only showing that for the most popular queries, there is minimal difference (as this is the relatively trivial-to-clone segment).
The power of Google is its ability to provide higher quality results for rarer and non-trivial searches. Bing has made no attempt to compete here (and would do a disservice in education).
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.
Make up your own damn mind!
I don't need third party statistics to see that every time I give Bing a try I end up wasting more time and end up going back to Google.
This is across the board. It does not matter if I am looking for help with our Windows Domain (LOL) or if I am looking for info on growing the biggest tomatoes on the block.
Try searching the Microsoft website for the download location of some service pack vs doing the same on Google. The later tends to get me right where I want to go with ONE click.
Bing is shit for almost all of my information gathering search queries. Forcing students to use it will hurt their education. Nice move!
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.
I just did my study, I wanted to find search results from the last week on a topic.
Google allowed me to filter by time (somewhat)
Bing did not allow me to restrict my results (fail).
In fact nearly 90% of Bing results were not from the desired time period, whereas nearly 90% of the Google results were.
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.
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. ..." it will then ignore your search query and come up with anything related to one word in your query rather than the entire thing.
* On being told "No, I really wanted to search for
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The power of Google is its ability to provide higher quality results for rarer and non-trivial searches. Bing has made no attempt to compete here
Wouldn't that be mainly due to Google's incumbancy?
As someone who rarely goes to Bing, and just took a peak, I am always amazed at how much of Google MS has mimicked. Layouts, menus, color schemes. There appears to be very little that is really original or obvious improvements. Not talking even about quality of results. Which would seem to indicate, if you want the latest / greatest features in search, you will see them first at Google. Bing is just an imitation. Its like they are providing a branded version of Google. Which isn't news. MS has a long history of taking things other people have developed, putting their spin on it, finding a way to shove it into the market using their OS dominance and name, and then either grabbing market share, and with a little luck maybe make some money. But rarely do they have an original idea, or improve on someone else's ideas. Apple, OTOH, takes other people's ideas, and tends to improve them, and usually make some money. Google just has ideas, some good, some not so good.
I tried the Bing It On challenge, just for fun. On at least one question I thought I was selecting the Bing result, but it turned out that I chose Google 4 out of 4 times. Bing falls apart as soon as you try using any of the special "tricks" that Google provides.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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 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.
No, it's true. Ballmer sends trained interns into Google data centers to swipe and hide Google Results in their cavities. That's why they have results out the wazoo.
As someone who rarely goes to Bing, and just took a peak, I am always amazed at how much of Google MS has mimicked. Layouts, menus, color schemes.
As someone who frequently goes to both, you'd be surprised to know Bing is the one being mimicked.
Neither are remotely as good as Google was five years ago.
This is what bugs me the most. In an effort to have million of hits for every search, they've completely screwed up the actual usefulness of the search itself. It wouldn't be so bad if Google had always sucked, but it actually used to be very good.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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.