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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 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
>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).
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.
I see where you are coming from. The concern is that if kids never see ads, how will they recognize ads as adults? While I recognize that, I purposely keep my children ad free as much as possible and its had a lot of positive effects. When my kids go down the cereal aisle at a supermarket, they're not screaming for the brand name cereal like my siblings and I did as children. I'm able to teach them first to look at nutrition labels, how to spot marketing techniques like greenwashing, etc... And now that they are able to think, we can sit down and discuss an advertisement when they show up.
A bit of a story. My 3yo son was playing with an app geared for preschoolers when suddenly a full video toy ad played. He was captivated, thought they were the most amazing toy ever, and began repeating the catchphrase of the ad all day that day. My 6yo daughter sat down with him and said, "That's an ad. It looks cool, but in real life it might not be as much fun as the ad makes it out to be." She understood it.
So my point is to have the parent educate their kids on marketing rather than have them figure it out the hard way by becoming a target of advertising.