In well over a decade of journalism, I’ve seen a fair amount of copied designs, but I’ve never seen anything as blatant as Bing’s recently abandoned attempt to hoodwink people into believing they were actually using Google.
Since time immemorial, people have used a system’s default apps to look for better alternatives, and to switch to those instead. Back in the day, Internet Explorer was often used to download Firefox or Chrome, before being forgotten forever. Now, the same thing is happening with Bing—Microsoft’s search engine—and the company clearly isn’t pleased about it.
If you use Microsoft’s Edge browser and haven’t changed any of its default settings, Bing is your search engine. Earlier this month, when you typed the word “Google” into that browser’s address bar, you would see a page that you may have mistaken for a Google search, but you’d actually still be on Bing. The illusion came complete with a fake Google doodle, a search bar with Google-like text underneath it, results laid out in a way that aped Google’s design, and other spoofed Google UI elements. This was first spotted by 9to5Google.
The worst part was that the spoofed page even hid Microsoft Bing’s branding by automatically scrolling past it. Normally, Bing’s branding and the search bar are prominently visible at the top of every search.
A few weeks later (and after the practice garnered a whole lot of attention, from this website and others), the charade seems to be over: Searching for “Google” on Bing now takes you to a standard Bing results page. But it’s clear that they attempted this scheme at all that Microsoft has noticed that people are using Bing to locate Google, and isn’t happy about that.
Parisa Tabriz, the vice president of Google Chrome, expressed her displeasure at the move on X (formerly Twitter). Her post reads, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Microsoft spoofing the Google homepage is another tactic in its long history of tricks to confuse users & limit choice. New year; new low @Microsoft.” If you’re unhappy with such tricks, you can easily switch the default browser on Windows 11.
Editor’s note: We have reached out to Microsoft for comment but haven’t yet gotten a response.