Microsoft Pushing Bing For Search In Schools, With Ad-Removal Hook 158
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?"
Re:Uh, no? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I tried it (Score:4, Informative)
I tried DuckDuckGo last year for a bit. I loved their philosophy, and I loved some of the enhancements they made to the whole search experience... but at least when I tried it, their actual search results were kinda crap. When I realized about 2/3s of the time I just ended up typing !google [search terms], I said screw it and went back to google.
I'd rather Google get all my searches and everything than Microsoft anyway, though. At least Google knows how to do useful things with all that data.
Re: As much as we love to hate Microsoft... (Score:5, Informative)
Nipped it in the BUD. And you used it incorrectly. It means, "to put an end to something before it develops into something larger." [thefreedictionary.com]
-- Your friendly grammar nazi.