June 1st, 2009
Bing: Not on my teachers' short list
So Bing, the much-hyped new search tool from Microsoft, is live. As promised, I took it for a spin today from the perspective of the student/teacher looking to extract something relevant from the web and access information in new and more useful ways. My initial take from the video Microsoft posted this weekend didn’t exactly leave me wowed, but a video can hardly tell the whole, can it?
I started by searching for cascading style sheets. I’m redesigning a web site using CSS and needed some references. Since students and teachers will often hit a search engine with a fairly broad need, I figured this would be a good first pass. Of course, a Visual Studio ad was at the top, but that’s completely acceptable in modern search engines. A list of references, including the W3C CSS pages, Wikipedia’s entry on CSS, and several other reference sites appeared. Related searches were handy and didn’t require the extra clicks needed to access them in Google; this is actually a great feature as we try to teach students effective search techniques.
Ultimately, though, the returned results were no different from Yahoo’s or Google’s. Another search on “chemistry homework help” yielded similarly generic results, even without Google’s PageRank algorithms standing in the way of unbiased searching. So nothing incredibly compelling yet, although Bing seems to be a perfectly fine search engine (I didn’t tap into the online shopping components since those should be of limited relevance to students and teachers).
Then, however, I couldn’t resist checking out the embedded video preview that Loic Le Meur so kindly pointed out. Several outlets have already pointed out how easily kids could use this feature to access thumbnail-sized full-motion previews of all sorts of video content. While most content filters seem to catch the previews within Bing, it certainly seems to provide one-stop shopping for curious kids, easily minimized before teacher/parent eyes can make it to the screen.
I’m just not seeing any reason to recommend Bing to teachers (and I see one in the form of some slick video previews that would probably recommend against it). Not only would I recommend Wolfram Alpha, but we’ll be offering training on it in the fall. Search engines are search engines are search engines. While Alpha brings something new to the academic table, Bing certainly won’t make it on the short list of web resources on which we train staff and students.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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