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:Search engines are a commodity

[Anonymous Coward]

>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).

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.