Let me use this introductory paragraph to make two horrible confessions. The first: I am one of perhaps several people worldwide who use Microsoft Edge as my default personal browser. Second: My use of Edge means I sometimes accidentally use Bing, Microsoft’s Google-but-worse, whenever I search for something in the URL bar. I could go into the settings and switch my default search engine, but no, I prefer to feel the hot sting of shame whenever I search for something and get precisely not what I’m looking for. Also it gets me Microsoft points or something.
Most people aren’t me, though, and quite sensibly use browsers that surpass ‘basically fine’ and search engines that do better than ‘worthless’, which is presumably why Microsoft seems to be trying to trick Bing users into thinking they’re actually on Google. As spotted by Windows Latest, if you open up a Bing tab right now and use it to search ‘Google’, the search engine will return a big honking box that looks suspiciously like Google on top of the regular search results. Here’s an example to save you the psychic damage of using Bing yourself.
Which seems downright egregious if you ask me. OK, sure, it could be worse: Microsoft could have wiped out the normal search results entirely, or worked some algorithm magic to make full-fat Google something other than the top search result, but it’s still pretty bad. Not only does the page bear a striking resemblance to everyone’s default search engine (featuring some kind of doodle), but Bing actually subtly scrolls you down when it loads the page to obscure the big ol’ Microsoft Bing banner at the top.
It probably wouldn’t fool you or me, but I’d bet a billion it’d hoodwink your less tech-literate family members and friends. You know, the kind of people who might find themselves doing a Bing search for ‘Google’. It’s frankly pretty gross, and seems like a tacit admission that, yeah, no one wants to use Bing, so the best it can do is dress itself up as the thing people actually want instead. It’s like if Pepsi started distributing itself in red cans.
Plus, I mean, imagine being bad enough that disguising yourself as Google is a step-up? It might be the default search engine for most of us, but in an era of AI garbage and SEO-massaged slop pumped out into disposable website after disposable website, even the king of search is looking pretty sickly these days. Maybe we need to get back to looking things up in the library.