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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 as well, along with NoScript and RequestPolicy. And I still see ads. I don't care though, because they aren't using JS or coming from a site that tracks me.
I also use Duckduckgo, Wolfram Alpha, and other search engines as necessary. And sometimes I find that Google still provides the best results (particularly for location specific information, and for non-USA information). But it's getting rarer.
But there are so many tools out there that do provide better results than Google a lot of the time, that I just don't use it.
I also don't use Bing, but that's because it sucks. I always found it had too much of a US bias, e.g. search for Melbourne and it comes up with stuff for a city in Florida. Similarly for Moscow, half the first page results are for some insignificant location in Idaho. Repeat for St Petersburg and you get results for the St Petersburg, and another one in some irrelevant location. Here's a hint MS, I don't care about the shitty cities in the USA with the same name as more famous places, unless I am in the USA, in that state, or also search for the name of the state.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
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
First bing result for Melbourne: 'Melbourne / m l b n, - b r n / is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia.' First bing result for Moscow: 'Moscow is the capital city and the most populous federal subject of Russia'
>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).
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.
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.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
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.
I was with you up to this point.
"good enough for typical searches for "with no ads!!!"" is not good enough for me. I want my kids to learn to think for themselves and make use of all the tools at their disposal. It's especially important at the grade school level where they develop the habits they'll use for the rest of their academic career and beyond.
This is a marketing strategy and I would be offended if I found out that my daughter's school was forcing her to use Bing. I won't have MS using my kids education as a marketing tool against their competitor at the cost of her future education and research habits. If the school wanted to provide Bing as the default, but still allowed the students to use Google, Yahooh or DuckDuckGo, I'd be ok with that, but I'm not ok with them choosing one and limiting exposure to other methods and comparing results.
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.
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.
Nothing breaks my suspension of disbelief in a movie more than seeing a tech-savvy kid or young adult using Bing. I've seen it in several movies now, and they always make it blatantly obvious that they are using Bing and not Google.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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.
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.
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.
I don't use Bing, either, but I do if someone's looking over my shoulder. I also say thing things like, "let me Bing that for you." The reactions are great, but I think I actually got some people using it. I feel a little bad for that.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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.