This is partly preying on the fact googles 'doodles' weaken their brand/trademark.
Back when every google doodle clearly had the word "Google" in, that was okay.
But often now, the doodles are just some random picture. At that point, there is no brand recognition to their homepage beyond a blank white background and centered search box, which microsoft has copied here because those elements alone are not enough to form a legally protectable brand.
I agree, but for the record, if Google wanted to sue, they wouldn’t be completely out of luck. They could make claims under the Lanham Act §1125(a), state unfair competition laws, or other fraud-adjacent laws. But they would have to prove that Microsoft was deceiving customers, and it would be a lot harder without an actual case of trademark infringement.
They could also try to claim trademark infringement based on the fact that Microsoft is hijacking searches for the keyword “google”. Courts have previously rejected trademark claims when a company takes out search ads using its competitor’s name as a keyword, but Google could argue that what Microsoft is doing here is more deceptive than that.
(IANAL and have only passing familiarity, but I’m fairly confident in the above.)
IANAL as well. but I have to say, if typing into typing Google into the Bing search and getting a page that looks almost exactly like Google can't be proven as intent to deceive, then the law is broken.
I can't imagine anything clearer to prove intent than a user requesting that they want to go to Google to Bing, Bing responds to that request by showing them a page that looks like Google's. That is so clear. Is that really not able to be proven in court?
At this point the events you’re describing are decades ago. To me they are as relevant to the Google and Microsoft of today as saying that Apple is not to be trusted because they messed up the Performa line.
Not irrelevant, but those company are faceless, far bigger, far more insidious than when the events you describe happened.
Indeed starting by FOSS folks talking about the man, while complaining that no one from big tech returns anything, even though they play by the rules of the licensing.
A sad excuse for criminal conduct. Believe it or not there are lots of law abiding businesses, and companies that compete on quality, service, and price.
And even if that were an extreme minority (and I don't think it is) we should praise them as models instead of resigning ourselves to mediocre businesses using illegal tactics to control a market for super profits.
In some ways it weakens their brand in that maybe it's easier to pretend to be them but in others it makes people feel good about them. I like the doodles.
I bet this is 100x+ more effective at keeping people on Bing than anything else MS has tried. Same idea as knock-off brands with labels and designs inspired by the name brand.
People may eventually realize they're not on Google, but probably only after being not displeased in Bing's results. If they have a bad experience, oh well, they were planning on using google anyway.
I consider Bing better in some areas, and equivalent in most others. Their image search is definitely better. Text search is... well, not good, but not any worse than Google.
I perused the Bing rewards site [1]. It seems that you need 1,000 Bing searches to get a $5 Microsoft or Xbox gift card (3rd party gift cards seem more expensive). There are also daily caps on rewards from Bing searches.
Are Google results good? I stop using Google years ago because of the garbage results (a lot of spam sites that were just serving data crawled from Github and other sites).
My primary search engine as of now is DDG, Their results are mostly fine (and powered partly by Bing). When their results are not good enough, I ask Google; often, but not always, it's better. For some other kinds of queries, Google fares notably worse than DDG, likely because SEO tricks are disproportionately directed against Google, and not always work against other search engines as effectively.
I've had my issues with Google ever since they ran a series of ads pretending to be for Blender but actually linking to a scam site. (I’m not sure if it’s gotten better since then.) While I do occasionally come across questionable ads on Bing, they’re definitely much less frequent. For what it’s worth, I’ve switched to using Edge as my browser as well, largely because Google refuses to address one of the most frustrating issues with its external link profile behavior. Specifically, Google forces external links to open in the last-used profile, rather than letting you choose, whereas Edge allows you to customize this behavior.
On top of that, Bing’s deep search feature has proven to be genuinely useful
If your search engine doesn't have ads that only means the adblocker has nothing to do except use some cpu cycles.
Those cycles are mostly earned back when you visit a link with ads (unless the search results are limited to ad free sites). So, it's still a net positive to have an ad-blocker.
> Specifically, Google forces external links to open in the last-used profile, rather than letting you choose, whereas Edge allows you to customize this behavior.
This is a neat feature, I used browserosaurus for a similar behaviour, but also that means I have multiple browsers open, one basically for each profile.
Running those same specific queries now, the Google results are as bad or worse than Bing's results at the time, and Bing now frequently gets the results that Google did at the time. But my everyday experience is still that Google gives generally better results than Bing / DDG.
I don’t believe for one second that Google’s results are better. Their market share is so big that no one running SEO scams is looking at their Bing results. So that immediately makes the Bing results far more organic and sane.
>Their market share is so big that no one running SEO scams is looking at their Bing results
That's pretty unsound logic for two reasons. One is that it's not very likely that SEO optimization for different mainstream search engines requires any more effort than for one, secondly Bings ~5% market share is what, tens of millions of people still? If nobody games it you're leaving free money on the floor, and internet scammers are hyper competitive.
They're really using every tactic they can -- and for the life of me, I have no idea why. They've pushed so hard, for so long, to make Bing succeed -- even forcing it in the Start menu -- and it's still not owning the search space.
In my opinion, they'd be much more effective if they just killed the Bing brand, killed Bing rewards, killed the Bing newsfeeds, rebranded it to "Private Search" at privatesearch.com, and called it a day. Yes, people have memories shorter than a goldfish.
Agreed that the Bing brand has to go, but I think they should use their normal naming schemes, something like "Microsoft Azure Cloud Search Pro 2025 SP1"
Honestly whatever the hell Google offers at this point has been disguising itself as google search for years. It sure as shit is not what people expect from google.
I had similar thoughts; my gut says that this is bad behavior by Microsoft, but that what Google has done to their own supposed product is bad enough to justify it.
Nothing can keep me on Bing unless the results improve. Or am I the only one who regularily gives Bing a try only to find out the results are irrelevant?
It just seems I’m doing the google -> bing -> yandex thing a lot now.
And then I don’t bother with many competitors because they’re all bing based anyway.
Way down the list sometimes I resort to Brave search. Not because it’s good. But in fact, because it’s so bad, it might be indexing something the others tried getting rid of for a good year or two after everyone else tried to memory hole it.
Which has helped me pull cached versions of something interesting “to me” that wasn’t interesting enough for someone else to have gotten with archive.today
Think the most recent one I went down the whole rabbit hole on was a tv show called “that’s my bush” from Comedy Central. I was willing to buy them but they were Unobtainium. I did end up finding the episodes on archive.org and on torrents, via yandex. Great example of something harmless and hilarious that Big Social and Big Search just HAS to protect my delicate sensibilities and my fragile mind from.
Just to underscore how stupid and petty some of this stuff has gotten. Even if it’s not outright censorship of (at best) tangentially “political” content (they had planned on lampooning whoever won, thinking Al Gore was going to be president, and it’s the same guys who did South Park so it’s culturally and historically interesting to some of us) it proves how increasingly irrelevant Google has become.
Google and Bing both hid their availability on archive.org from me and I would not have thought to look there. Meanwhile, first hit on Yandex.
I use bing chat (ChatGPT something) cos it works without login. I have it on a shortcut search trigger in Firefox with temporary tab containers. Replaced more than 50% of my searches, I use Kagi for the rest.
Honestly, I'm under the impression they've converged so much recently I can't be bothered to switch on my work machine, and I don't think this is because Bing is getting better.
I think there are a few areas where Google still has an advantage (if I search with a city name, Google will match results to the city my IP address is located on and not a smaller, less significant one in the United States) but I think their self promotion and AI Q&A bullshit in results is actually worse.
Perhaps something like LMArena but for search engines could help them understand what underperforms.. is there a tool where i could see results side by side? I never thought about that..
I started a new job and the browser default was set to Edge. I never bothered to change it and defaulted to using Bing for search. TBH, I don't notice a difference in results.
Disclaimer - I used to work on Bing like... 8 years ago.
There's probably some debate around whether this is nefarious or genius, but I'd lead towards the later. "google" has always been one of the number one search terms, and the amount of people who would open chrome, search for google in the address bar, then open google in the google search results, then do their search, was wild. There's a very large percentage of less technical people who aren't looking for Google, they're looking for search, and in their mind the two are the same.
They likely don't care what search engine they're using, so I suspect this actually captures a very large amount of search volume, while still solving the intent of the user.
Disclamer - I owned a restaurant that gave Pepsi products to customers who explicitly ask for a Coke.
There's probably some debate about whether this is nefarious or genius, but I lean towards the later. "Coke" has always been the number one request from our patrons, and the amount of people who just wanted any soda but said "coke" was wild. there's a very large percentage of poorly palated patrons who aren't looking for a Coca-Cola, they're looking for a soda, and in their mind the two are the same.
They likely don't care which soda they're drinking, so I suspect this actually captures a very large amount of soda sales, while still solving the intent of the patron.
What's that? There's a process server outside? Whatever for?
A perfect analogy, if I were to trust the glass with my deepest darkest secrets, had a relationship with it going back decades, expect it to point me to the right direction and keep track of much of my correspondence, and so on and so forth.
OK, maybe a glass of soft drink somehow doesn’t do that, but I suppose it’s perfect analogy adjacent.
This example was doomed from the start because of this fact.
A lot of the US south uses the generic "coke."* It is not uncommon for this conversation to play out: "Can I get a coke?" "Sure, which kind?" "A Coke" (or a pepsi, or fanta)
In my neck of the woods we call it "pop" which always sounded strange to me in isolation.
* As famously depicted in the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey.
That's what makes it work as a metaphor, I think. Our former Microsoft friend above says that when people ask for "google search," what they mean is "any search engine," just as people in Georgia say "coke" when they mean "a soda." You say the right response is "sure, what kind," but the Microsoft solution is to serve them a Pepsi that they disguised to resemble a Coca-Cola at first glance.
I definitely get what you're saying - there's an element here of taking what a customer asks for and returning something different, but I think it's an imperfect analogy.
It's not bringing them a Coke, it's bringing them a dispenser that says "Cola" next to a fridge with options. For people who just want Cola, it's immediately available. For those with a brand choice, there are additional options.
The reality I'm trying to portray though is that the demographic of people who search "Google" in a search field rarely overlaps with the demographic of people who are opinionated about their search tool, so this ends up serving a segment of the population in the way they expected.
It’s a cheap trick from some 20 year old fresh out of college. It works though but it makes Microsoft look soft and somehow non professional. But still good for them if they get to convert a few users
I don't see anything wrong with that. Coke is pretty much generic term. And Pepsi and Coke and other brands of cola flavored sweetened water are all pretty much the same.
People shouldn't be drinking this stuff at all anyways. It should be mandatorily white labeled anyways.
> They likely don't care what search engine they're using
That's nothing, for our next iteration our navigation system will take you to the nearest Woolworths because they've got a commercial partnership with us even though the customer quite clearly said 'Coles'. It's likely they don't care.
If you want to make it more accurate, the car started in the Woolworths parking lot or something. But that doesn't capture many of the other aspects. Hmm.
My best attempt at this car analogy is more like... you walk over to some idling Lyft drivers and say you need an Uber to Coles. And then one of them drives you to Coles instead of driving you to the nearest Uber idling spot.
Huh, imagine if current operating system trends are applied to car computers. "To store your seat settings across reboots, get our Comfort subscription. [Subscribe] [Not Now]".
In fact, how shitty have OSes become that they are nagware now?
Older people don’t understand the idea of “search engine”, they understand “google”. They don’t realize you can “google” through Bing as well. I hate it, but it is what it is.
The ones debating whether this is nefarious or not are the ones ruining the tech industry. This is absolutely nefarious. Whether or not it's a clever path to promotion due to corporate incentives is irrelevant.
I'm curious what part of Microsoft's culture enables these satirically slimy product decisions. In theory, other megacorps should be no better, but somehow they seem to maintain a bar that Microsoft always manages to stoop below
With all due respect, still feels bs to rationalizing the intentional misleding of these poor people. It is not a coincidence that Google and search is the same in their heads.
Is it bad to mislead these poor people when the outcome is better? Google is not good at returning results and is exceptionally good at directing nontechnical users to malicious ads. Bing is saving people.
If a user is not equipped to determine the difference between Google and Bing, you should not redirect them to a website which is 80% ads.
I used Bing on mobile for a while, and I quickly noticed a horrible dark pattern: the mobile website has a little banner that pops up at the top prompting you to download their app, but this banner only loads in after a short delay (maybe half a second) after the rest of the page. In particular, it shows up right where the search bar was (pushing the bar downwards) - meaning that if I aim for the search bar right when the page loads, I often end up hitting the banner ad right as it loads in. I’ve probably loaded their App Store page a dozen times at this point by accident - it’s that annoying.
I swear this is deliberate. There’s not really any good reason for a delay on the “you should get our app” banner that I can see, and even less of a good reason to have it load at the exact position of the search bar. Some engineer in Redmond is probably feeling really good about tricking people this way…
Fun fact: Microsoft Ads (the place you go to buy ads on Bing) is essentially a carbon copy of Google Ads in every way imaginable. The UI is, quite literally, exactly the same. The names of the features are nearly identical. There is very little differentiation, and it's 100% by design - doing this makes it very easy for marketing people to switch between ad platforms without needing to learn a completely new interface.
It's quite entertaining to watch. Google will release a feature, and then a few weeks later Microsoft announces the exact same thing.
Microsoft is learning that copying success is often easier than creating it from scratch. Making their products look identical to Google's makes it a lot easier to switch between the 2.
They've always used copying as one of their signature moves, see zune vs ipod, win3/95 vs mac, early Internet explorer based on spyglass/NCSA mosaic, Novell eDirectory vs ActiveDirectory, C# vs Java, F# vs Ocaml, and many more I would have to think hard about and take a long time to remember.
They tend to enter late with a me-too product, whether they copy, acquire, or embrace-extend-extinguish, but copying does play as large a role as any of their strategies, none of which generally involve actual innovation and often lean heavily on illegal, underhanded, or unethical business tactics.
Please try using F# or C# for once and you'll see how incorrect this statement is. Both had huge amounts of novel work that influenced the whole industry.
Adversarial compatability is not a reason to mock a competitor to an entrenched monopoly.
I have no love for Microsoft, but the idea that a locked in monopoly, responsible for tainting or outright destroying huge swaths of the internet, is a "success"...
Not gonna lie though. Making a fake page that looks like a competitor to show people after they ask you to give them their competitors site is very mockable.
I see the similarities between these situations, but the difference is deception, Not that it's "copying".
I prefer bing + copilot as a search engine over google if I must use one. Been using it since the beta, have a corporate/business account now. It (usually) provides a good description of my answer and gives sources I can click on to verify. No other search engine I am aware of is doing this right now, although I know chatGPT has recently introduced or talked about a feature like this (I don't really use chatGPT). This is exactly what I want in a good search tool. However, my frustration with bing arises in that from one day to the next there is absolutely no consistency in how "good" the tool feels - almost like there are times they downgraded the underlying model to reduce load/cost without informing the user. They should focus on a better user experience than google, which if I can interject my opinion, is a shockingly low bar these days, and let growth happen by simply being a good tool - all the gimmicks and attempts they've made at mass adoption has seemed very forced. And yes, I'm aware of the natural lock-in advantage google has and how hard that is to surmount, but bing has a large enough percentage of search userbase by now to achieve its own critical mass if it needed to, IMO. Forcing adoption and locking it into microsoft ecosystem will probably eventually be the reason I stop using it.
I started a new job where I have to use windows, and more than once I didn’t realize I was using bing until I went to turn on verbatim and it wasn’t an option.
Side note, I miss search engines from 20 years ago, I can’t believe it’s gotten this bad.
It's my daily driver too. Quality is ok but not as good as Google from a few years ago. Snippets (especially code) and shortcuts are cool.
It's less censored than Google, but then they went on and censored russian propaganda during the war.
They completely lost all their credibility. I don't care how bad or good the content it is, I want a service without censorship.
For copyrighted content they are a bit better than Google but worse than Yandex - simply because 90% of DMCA strikers agencies bother reporting a google search result, 50% bother with duckduckgo, 10% bother with Yandex.
That's the "offensively inoffensive" Corporate Memphis art which Microsoft is pushing aggressively everywhere, so I recognised it at first glance as being from MS and not Google. Google has a slightly different style.
> This is only funny because no one takes bing seriously.
But Microsoft is way more dangerous than Google. They've been using all the dirtiest tricks in the books since decades longer than Google. MSFT also has a market cap 30% greater than the one of GOOG.
Microsoft is known in the industry, all around the world, for illegal kickbacks (including to officials).
Google may be bad but Microsoft is just downright an evil company. In addition to that, as the old saying goes, the day Microsoft produces a product that won't suck, it's going to be a vacuum cleaner.
At least Google gave back a lot to open source and contributed a huge lot to Linux and to Linux's success.
I'm not saying Google is clean but they're not anywhere near as dirty as Microsoft.
The whole agenda / narrative that pushed by Microsoft shills atm is also all too obvious "You must break Google". I don't think so. I think it's Microsoft that should be broken up by anti-trust regulations enforcement.
Also, not using Android or Chrome is very feasible for almost everyone (thanks to iOS and Firefox/Chromium). Not using Windows is almost impossible for a large array of use cases and professions.
I think it's hilarious because they're doing the same shenanigans that Google does.
When you search on Google everything above the fold is not "a list of search results". Often it's a definition or conversion calculator or some other custom UI that isn't "a list of search results".
Microsoft has programmed Bing to do the exact same thing. Everything above the fold is a custom UI that coincidentally looks a lot like the Google Search engine. The Chef's kiss is that it scrolls down just the tiniest bit to put the Bing UI above the fold rather than hide it. This gives them plausible deniability.
It's brilliant and hilarious. I love it. I'm still not using Bing (or Google for that matter) but I love it.
Everything they've done for the past few years has been desperate.
If you try to download Chrome on a new Windows install, at every step of the way, it begs you to reconsider, shit talking Chrome, saying Edge runs on Chromium so it won't make a difference, trying to throw pop ups at you to distract you. At some point, Edge would literally open a tooltip in the top right corner of the page where the download button on chrome.com used to be. And it continues as you try to make Chrome the default browser. After all that, there are still plenty of tasks in Windows that still open Edge...
It feels really sad and pathetic when a massive company desperately begs you to do something, not just Microsoft. Please install this! Please don't disable that! Please allow this permission! We really want you to do this! I would say "have some class" but class doesn't make stonk price go up.
It deeply saddens people still use anything Google. GMail and Youtube are big ones that are difficult to switch. But browsers and search engines are eons better now.
Given the tricks that Google play (or at least played) in hijacking their own search results to scare users into switching to Chrome, I shed no tears here. Google set a new lower standard in deceitful behaviour, and Microsoft are simply following.
Sheesh, if what you say is true I guess decency is headed towards extinction, and even big companies are acting like the supposed con-men sellers of a Middle Eastern bazaar...
If MS hasn't changed the result in the meantime, the screenshot in the article is slightly dishonest by omission. The journalist has manipulated the browser window's size and scrolled down a bit so that only the "promoted result" is visible and without any indication. The journalist's characterization
> Before you scroll down to the actual search results, you’re presented with an all-white page with a centered, unbranded search bar and a multicolored doodle above it that’s heavy on yellow, red, blue, and green.
is dishonest.
In actuality, Google-like interface appears as a full-width promoted result/ad before the organic results. There is vaguely the words "Promoted by Microsoft" by the top-left, and a 'X' by the top-right. For large enough viewports, the 'X' and organic search results are visible. The "Promoted by Microsoft" is visible without scrolling at any size.
Note nevertheless that the journalist has also failed to point out a particular interaction that would support their thesis. For searches that trigger this "promotion", the window immediately scrolls the page so that the promotion is aligned to the top of the viewport, and the search bar in the promotion is focused. (The "Promoted by Microsoft" is visible without scrolling at any size.)
If one is logged in (and on Edge?), this promotion is still present, but as a tiny search box before the organic results.
> Note nevertheless that the journalist has also failed to point out a particular interaction that would support their thesis. For searches that trigger this "promotion", the window immediately scrolls the page so that the promotion is aligned to the top of the viewport, and the search bar in the promotion is focused. (The "Promoted by Microsoft" is visible without scrolling at any size.)
That's what I said. This is still in contradiction with the screenshot, which I described as:
> The journalist has manipulated the browser window's size and scrolled down a bit so that only the "promoted result" is visible and without any indication.
where the "Promoted by Microsoft" is NOT visible. I find that dishonest.
I was wondering why Google hadn't replaced 'I'm Feeling Lucky' with something to do with LLMs, or just added an LLM-generate option. I came to the conclusion that they're in corporate denialism over the whole thing. They'd be happier if their finger slipped and made Anthropic and OpenAI vanish until they could resurface and capture the market. Possibly not a great strategy.
It seems all of their years of letting the open web decay and vanish has caught up with the fact that many requests can be serviced with an inverse thesaurus manual snippet soup.
I'm usually not a fan of user deception. But I can't bring myself to care much that Bing is trying to play off the masses' pavlovian trust of the google interface.
Interestingly enough, you can already use Bings settings to disable all the cruft on bing.com. If you do that, I think the majority of users would not know the difference between Google and Bing, other than a more pleasant search experience and fewer ads (or no ads, I'm currently see zero ads or trackers on bing.com without any ad blocker).
Seems hard to justify staying on Google, when Bing yields the same or better results, and less ads.
And, at least in the EU, we get LLM responses (via MS Copilot) on Bing, but no "AI Overview" on Google. Though seeing how poorly Google AI Overview on search works, I'd rather not have that offered to me.
You can disable it entirely apparently. I just checked the settings on Bing and there is a "Copilot response on result page" which can simply be turned off.
That one good thing about Microsoft, they aren't afraid of offering the users settings.
Weirdly, it works for me on FireFox (I see the Google-like page) but not on Edge (where I just see a link for Google, no mimicry). I am not signed in on Edge.
Never quite understood the hate for Bing. I despise Microsoft, but Bing is fine. It's one of the least shit Microsoft products there is. It definitely wasn't competitive on release, but it's fine now.
To be fair I think this is a function of both Bing having gotten better and Google having gotten worse.
Initially it reeked of IE by association. But then internet communities realized it was better than google for porn. So now its OK in some circles at least.
Honestly, this is what I want bing's 'homepage' to look like and I usually configure it to be as close to that as I can. The default was/is a ton of news and other junk. I just want a search bar and maybe an identifier picture. It was one of the things I liked when google first came out. It was 'simple' as many of the other search engines from years ago had tons of 'helpful' things on the front page that I just did not want.
> starts spamming trashy news.
Think I am on my 4th or 5th time going into the settings to turn it off too.
I think google may be starting to do something similar too. I think I got caught in an A/B test a week or so ago. Little bits of news popping on the landing page. Off to the settings to turn that off. Which then somehow messed up the settings on my phone as well.
Computers doing 'surprising things' makes users angry and feel like they do not have control.
That was back when everyone was trying to make a "portal" to compete with AOL. It seems like browsers are headed down the same path now with replacing the simple search box new tab page with the same stuff the portals had.
I've never used bing that much, but after google removed its cache feature last year, I found myself using bing a lot more often. A couple of weeks back I was so disappointed to find out that Microsoft had pulled the plug on bing's cache as well. I just can't grasp why anyone would think that removing the one feature that gave you edge over the competition was a good idea. AFAIK now the only search engine remaining with a cache is yandex.
I have a longtime dislike for Microsoft but google has become almost unusable recently with fake ai pages filling the results, and Bing seems to work better.
I stopped using DDG, which pulls results from Bing, because Bing fell very easily for SEO slop; yes, even worse than Google.
The most painful for me was a set of wikis filled with AI-generated nonsense about OCaml and some other niche languages, which completely shadowed genuine content on the first page of any search.
If I land on a Google page I search for Bing now. Colipot is included with Office and I'm signed in. Copilot is far more useful than Google search. I would use Bard (Gemini) but I don't have a work login for Google properties. Microsoft wins.
Bing lets me search even though I block their cookies, trackers, etc. Google doesn't. If I even wanted to use Google I'd have to go through the hassle of whitelisting their crap, and for what?
I remember people arguing on HN over a decade ago about how awful it was that on Google News you wouldn't get direct links, but instead links to their tracking system that would forward you to the story.
Now, they'll even refuse to forward the links unless you do a captcha, and you can't escape from captcha hell unless you accept cookies and you don't forge (or refuse to send) your referer.
We were talking about how most of the internet got locked behind walled gardens, but we didn't notice how much of the "open" internet secretly became a walled garden. Starting with that Facebook like button, Google Analytics, and Google ads everywhere, and culminating in Cloudflare MITMing everything.
aside: One of my personal conspiracy theories is that when the government wants deep activity on a site to be tracked, they DDOS the site until there's no other option than to add Cloudflare.
Seems pointless to me, I haven't used google.com or bing.com's main page in years. My browser search bar just searches my preferred search engine if I enter anything that isn't a URL.
Entirely changing the format of the results page based on a keyword match for a competitor is very much deception. Although they've been doing similar for years when you search for Chrome as the very first thing you do on a new install and there the entire screen is basically full of tricks to try to make you stay on Edge and pushing the actual search results down so far you need to scroll. I guess they've got away with that a long time, they probably don't think anyone will care.
It all feels a bit like the "I'm feeling lucky" button from years ago on Google when it was kind of the default choice for everyone because back then Google actually cared about putting the most useful page at the very top...
Remember when one of the best tricks was searching "French military victories" and pressing "I'm feeling lucky" took you to a page that looked exactly like the google results but said "No results found, maybe you meant 'French military defeats'". Classic stuff!
Looking at it charitably, it doesn't seem very different than going to some outdoor shop NatureLand(r), asking for a Thermos and them showing you a NatureLand(r) thermo flask. Sure, maybe you really wanted a thermo flask of the Thermos brand, but most people just want an insulated bottle for tea or some such.
I mean, I wouldn't react more to somebody saying that they googled something with bing than I react when somebody offers me tea but it's herbal infusion.
I'll have some reaction that is wrong, but it's also expected and common.
Then it was pretty foolish of you to just say "I can't." with no elaboration when the waiter asked about telling by taste. Well, either foolish or a deliberate bait so you could berate him more easily. Neither option looks good.
If you wouldn't have answered like that, then the story isn't about you.
It's a joke, and not a serious dialog, exactly because there may be a difference (not necessarily life and death, but maybe the price), but it fades beside the fact that the drink is so bad that its taste is incomprehensible.
Your second screenshot is scrolled up to show the top header bar that mentions Bing. The default page load scrolls down just enough to hide it (intentionally or otherwise).
No - google doesn't own the "image and text box on a web page design" ... but it is very odd what Microsoft/Bing is doing when you search 'google' .. they even 'scroll' the page down to hide the primary bing search bar. It's odd.
The story isn't "Bing is copying Google's amazing design." The story is bing devised a specialized search result page for the query "google" which is intentionally designed to trick its own users.
I would say it's more that you get to this page by typing "Google" into the URL/search bar:
> This morning, users are discovering that if they search for “Google” in the primary Bing interface, they’re shown a special Bing search page. Before you scroll down to the actual search results, you’re presented with an all-white page with a centered, unbranded search bar and a multicolored doodle above it that’s heavy on yellow, red, blue, and green.
This removes a step for someone that would have searched for google and then clicked on the link and then done their real search, so overall it sounds like a nice improvement in the vast majority of cases. I don't expect many people that care about the difference between search engines to be using this method.
They're not actually making a google search if they use that search field. Microsoft is just presenting another Bing search field when people search "google" and showing that at the top of the page instead of the link they are ostensibly looking for.
Not obvious to me. People that search for Google probably don't have a solid grasp on what the difference is between Google and a search engine. Perhaps it's muscle memory.
Back when every google doodle clearly had the word "Google" in, that was okay.
But often now, the doodles are just some random picture. At that point, there is no brand recognition to their homepage beyond a blank white background and centered search box, which microsoft has copied here because those elements alone are not enough to form a legally protectable brand.
They could also try to claim trademark infringement based on the fact that Microsoft is hijacking searches for the keyword “google”. Courts have previously rejected trademark claims when a company takes out search ads using its competitor’s name as a keyword, but Google could argue that what Microsoft is doing here is more deceptive than that.
(IANAL and have only passing familiarity, but I’m fairly confident in the above.)
I can't imagine anything clearer to prove intent than a user requesting that they want to go to Google to Bing, Bing responds to that request by showing them a page that looks like Google's. That is so clear. Is that really not able to be proven in court?
Bill Gates, the friendly philanthropist, was/is a business criminal. His company hasn't changed.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/microsoft-agrees-pay-20-milli...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
They waged a war of "FUD" against open-source software.
https://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/57261/index.html
And so on.
And Google is hardly a saint either. "Do no evil" was just marketing from that surveillance advertising firm.
Not irrelevant, but those company are faceless, far bigger, far more insidious than when the events you describe happened.
If you try to download and install chrome they do the same visual obfuscation, hide the button, and deceptilink you to use their browser.
Nothing has changed bro. Open your eyes. They never repented.
My point is not that they're better. It's that they're faceless now, they no longer have the personality you ascribe to them.
Not saying he's a saint who's never done anything wrong but who is?
It's just how business is done. If you don't get a leg up on your competitors, they'll get one up on you.
And even if that were an extreme minority (and I don't think it is) we should praise them as models instead of resigning ourselves to mediocre businesses using illegal tactics to control a market for super profits.
People may eventually realize they're not on Google, but probably only after being not displeased in Bing's results. If they have a bad experience, oh well, they were planning on using google anyway.
[1] https://rewards.bing.com/welcome
On top of that, Bing’s deep search feature has proven to be genuinely useful
Not because "privacy:", not because "tracking", but because malicious ads exist, and you'll click on one eventually.
This is even more true for less technical family members.
Those cycles are mostly earned back when you visit a link with ads (unless the search results are limited to ad free sites). So, it's still a net positive to have an ad-blocker.
This is a neat feature, I used browserosaurus for a similar behaviour, but also that means I have multiple browsers open, one basically for each profile.
Running those same specific queries now, the Google results are as bad or worse than Bing's results at the time, and Bing now frequently gets the results that Google did at the time. But my everyday experience is still that Google gives generally better results than Bing / DDG.
https://danluu.com/seo-spam/
That's pretty unsound logic for two reasons. One is that it's not very likely that SEO optimization for different mainstream search engines requires any more effort than for one, secondly Bings ~5% market share is what, tens of millions of people still? If nobody games it you're leaving free money on the floor, and internet scammers are hyper competitive.
But I'm mostly searching for tech stuff. Local content, or answering questions, google is better.
And then I don’t bother with many competitors because they’re all bing based anyway.
Way down the list sometimes I resort to Brave search. Not because it’s good. But in fact, because it’s so bad, it might be indexing something the others tried getting rid of for a good year or two after everyone else tried to memory hole it.
Which has helped me pull cached versions of something interesting “to me” that wasn’t interesting enough for someone else to have gotten with archive.today
Think the most recent one I went down the whole rabbit hole on was a tv show called “that’s my bush” from Comedy Central. I was willing to buy them but they were Unobtainium. I did end up finding the episodes on archive.org and on torrents, via yandex. Great example of something harmless and hilarious that Big Social and Big Search just HAS to protect my delicate sensibilities and my fragile mind from.
Just to underscore how stupid and petty some of this stuff has gotten. Even if it’s not outright censorship of (at best) tangentially “political” content (they had planned on lampooning whoever won, thinking Al Gore was going to be president, and it’s the same guys who did South Park so it’s culturally and historically interesting to some of us) it proves how increasingly irrelevant Google has become.
Google and Bing both hid their availability on archive.org from me and I would not have thought to look there. Meanwhile, first hit on Yandex.
I think there are a few areas where Google still has an advantage (if I search with a city name, Google will match results to the city my IP address is located on and not a smaller, less significant one in the United States) but I think their self promotion and AI Q&A bullshit in results is actually worse.
There's probably some debate around whether this is nefarious or genius, but I'd lead towards the later. "google" has always been one of the number one search terms, and the amount of people who would open chrome, search for google in the address bar, then open google in the google search results, then do their search, was wild. There's a very large percentage of less technical people who aren't looking for Google, they're looking for search, and in their mind the two are the same.
They likely don't care what search engine they're using, so I suspect this actually captures a very large amount of search volume, while still solving the intent of the user.
There's probably some debate about whether this is nefarious or genius, but I lean towards the later. "Coke" has always been the number one request from our patrons, and the amount of people who just wanted any soda but said "coke" was wild. there's a very large percentage of poorly palated patrons who aren't looking for a Coca-Cola, they're looking for a soda, and in their mind the two are the same.
They likely don't care which soda they're drinking, so I suspect this actually captures a very large amount of soda sales, while still solving the intent of the patron.
What's that? There's a process server outside? Whatever for?
OK, maybe a glass of soft drink somehow doesn’t do that, but I suppose it’s perfect analogy adjacent.
I have in fact heard "coke" used as a generic before. Just like google, kleenex, champaign, cheddar, ...
A lot of the US south uses the generic "coke."* It is not uncommon for this conversation to play out: "Can I get a coke?" "Sure, which kind?" "A Coke" (or a pepsi, or fanta)
In my neck of the woods we call it "pop" which always sounded strange to me in isolation.
* As famously depicted in the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey.
Did you tell them they were drinking Pepsi or ask some variant of "Is Pepsi okay?"
It's not bringing them a Coke, it's bringing them a dispenser that says "Cola" next to a fridge with options. For people who just want Cola, it's immediately available. For those with a brand choice, there are additional options.
The reality I'm trying to portray though is that the demographic of people who search "Google" in a search field rarely overlaps with the demographic of people who are opinionated about their search tool, so this ends up serving a segment of the population in the way they expected.
taking money for this is literally Google's business model
search for geico, entire initally visible results page is other insurance companies
People shouldn't be drinking this stuff at all anyways. It should be mandatorily white labeled anyways.
You should look into writing poetry. ;D
That's nothing, for our next iteration our navigation system will take you to the nearest Woolworths because they've got a commercial partnership with us even though the customer quite clearly said 'Coles'. It's likely they don't care.
My best attempt at this car analogy is more like... you walk over to some idling Lyft drivers and say you need an Uber to Coles. And then one of them drives you to Coles instead of driving you to the nearest Uber idling spot.
In fact, how shitty have OSes become that they are nagware now?
Machiavellian, even.
https://ianchadwick.com/machiavelli/chapters-15-21/chapter-1...
I'm curious what part of Microsoft's culture enables these satirically slimy product decisions. In theory, other megacorps should be no better, but somehow they seem to maintain a bar that Microsoft always manages to stoop below
If a user is not equipped to determine the difference between Google and Bing, you should not redirect them to a website which is 80% ads.
The fact windows is full of dark patterns to try and get you to use it is pathetic disrespectful hubris not genius.
I swear this is deliberate. There’s not really any good reason for a delay on the “you should get our app” banner that I can see, and even less of a good reason to have it load at the exact position of the search bar. Some engineer in Redmond is probably feeling really good about tricking people this way…
It's quite entertaining to watch. Google will release a feature, and then a few weeks later Microsoft announces the exact same thing.
Microsoft is learning that copying success is often easier than creating it from scratch. Making their products look identical to Google's makes it a lot easier to switch between the 2.
They tend to enter late with a me-too product, whether they copy, acquire, or embrace-extend-extinguish, but copying does play as large a role as any of their strategies, none of which generally involve actual innovation and often lean heavily on illegal, underhanded, or unethical business tactics.
I have no love for Microsoft, but the idea that a locked in monopoly, responsible for tainting or outright destroying huge swaths of the internet, is a "success"...
Not gonna lie though. Making a fake page that looks like a competitor to show people after they ask you to give them their competitors site is very mockable.
I see the similarities between these situations, but the difference is deception, Not that it's "copying".
Props for one of the rare times they apparently thought a UI through.
I wonder if Brave is specifically deleting this element.
Looks like it's targeting #b_pole ("Promoted by Microsoft")
-- Dr. Adrian Mallard
Side note, I miss search engines from 20 years ago, I can’t believe it’s gotten this bad.
Also, their AI offering duck.ai is pretty solid as well.
They completely lost all their credibility. I don't care how bad or good the content it is, I want a service without censorship.
For copyrighted content they are a bit better than Google but worse than Yandex - simply because 90% of DMCA strikers agencies bother reporting a google search result, 50% bother with duckduckgo, 10% bother with Yandex.
- no one ever
But Microsoft is way more dangerous than Google. They've been using all the dirtiest tricks in the books since decades longer than Google. MSFT also has a market cap 30% greater than the one of GOOG.
Microsoft is known in the industry, all around the world, for illegal kickbacks (including to officials).
Google may be bad but Microsoft is just downright an evil company. In addition to that, as the old saying goes, the day Microsoft produces a product that won't suck, it's going to be a vacuum cleaner.
At least Google gave back a lot to open source and contributed a huge lot to Linux and to Linux's success.
I'm not saying Google is clean but they're not anywhere near as dirty as Microsoft.
The whole agenda / narrative that pushed by Microsoft shills atm is also all too obvious "You must break Google". I don't think so. I think it's Microsoft that should be broken up by anti-trust regulations enforcement.
Shittiest company on earth.
When you search on Google everything above the fold is not "a list of search results". Often it's a definition or conversion calculator or some other custom UI that isn't "a list of search results".
Microsoft has programmed Bing to do the exact same thing. Everything above the fold is a custom UI that coincidentally looks a lot like the Google Search engine. The Chef's kiss is that it scrolls down just the tiniest bit to put the Bing UI above the fold rather than hide it. This gives them plausible deniability.
It's brilliant and hilarious. I love it. I'm still not using Bing (or Google for that matter) but I love it.
If you try to download Chrome on a new Windows install, at every step of the way, it begs you to reconsider, shit talking Chrome, saying Edge runs on Chromium so it won't make a difference, trying to throw pop ups at you to distract you. At some point, Edge would literally open a tooltip in the top right corner of the page where the download button on chrome.com used to be. And it continues as you try to make Chrome the default browser. After all that, there are still plenty of tasks in Windows that still open Edge...
> Before you scroll down to the actual search results, you’re presented with an all-white page with a centered, unbranded search bar and a multicolored doodle above it that’s heavy on yellow, red, blue, and green.
is dishonest.
In actuality, Google-like interface appears as a full-width promoted result/ad before the organic results. There is vaguely the words "Promoted by Microsoft" by the top-left, and a 'X' by the top-right. For large enough viewports, the 'X' and organic search results are visible. The "Promoted by Microsoft" is visible without scrolling at any size.
Note nevertheless that the journalist has also failed to point out a particular interaction that would support their thesis. For searches that trigger this "promotion", the window immediately scrolls the page so that the promotion is aligned to the top of the viewport, and the search bar in the promotion is focused. (The "Promoted by Microsoft" is visible without scrolling at any size.)
If one is logged in (and on Edge?), this promotion is still present, but as a tiny search box before the organic results.
That's what I said. This is still in contradiction with the screenshot, which I described as:
> The journalist has manipulated the browser window's size and scrolled down a bit so that only the "promoted result" is visible and without any indication.
where the "Promoted by Microsoft" is NOT visible. I find that dishonest.
I've avoided Google for years. Quack.
It seems all of their years of letting the open web decay and vanish has caught up with the fact that many requests can be serviced with an inverse thesaurus manual snippet soup.
Interestingly enough, you can already use Bings settings to disable all the cruft on bing.com. If you do that, I think the majority of users would not know the difference between Google and Bing, other than a more pleasant search experience and fewer ads (or no ads, I'm currently see zero ads or trackers on bing.com without any ad blocker).
Seems hard to justify staying on Google, when Bing yields the same or better results, and less ads.
That one good thing about Microsoft, they aren't afraid of offering the users settings.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=google
To be fair I think this is a function of both Bing having gotten better and Google having gotten worse.
Given Microsoft is “soo enterprise” it’s always a source of amazement that Microsoft feel it’s acceptable to default to this kind of spammy behaviour.
It just goes to show how running businesses by engagement scores really is just a race to the bottom.
I think google may be starting to do something similar too. I think I got caught in an A/B test a week or so ago. Little bits of news popping on the landing page. Off to the settings to turn that off. Which then somehow messed up the settings on my phone as well.
Computers doing 'surprising things' makes users angry and feel like they do not have control.
The most painful for me was a set of wikis filled with AI-generated nonsense about OCaml and some other niche languages, which completely shadowed genuine content on the first page of any search.
Now, they'll even refuse to forward the links unless you do a captcha, and you can't escape from captcha hell unless you accept cookies and you don't forge (or refuse to send) your referer.
We were talking about how most of the internet got locked behind walled gardens, but we didn't notice how much of the "open" internet secretly became a walled garden. Starting with that Facebook like button, Google Analytics, and Google ads everywhere, and culminating in Cloudflare MITMing everything.
aside: One of my personal conspiracy theories is that when the government wants deep activity on a site to be tracked, they DDOS the site until there's no other option than to add Cloudflare.
It all feels a bit like the "I'm feeling lucky" button from years ago on Google when it was kind of the default choice for everyone because back then Google actually cared about putting the most useful page at the very top...
Remember when one of the best tricks was searching "French military victories" and pressing "I'm feeling lucky" took you to a page that looked exactly like the google results but said "No results found, maybe you meant 'French military defeats'". Classic stuff!
I mean, I wouldn't react more to somebody saying that they googled something with bing than I react when somebody offers me tea but it's herbal infusion. I'll have some reaction that is wrong, but it's also expected and common.
They could at least get closer tho...
— Sorry, sir, you mean you cannot tell by the taste?
— I can't.
— Then what difference does it make?
If you wouldn't have answered like that, then the story isn't about you.
Bing.com will never not be associated with Ned Ryerson ...
Doesn't matter how much they disguise it!
What makes you believe that? It's pretty clearly intentional even if it only applies to Chromium browsers.
That's a little more than just aping the design of Google. It's a pretty intentional effort to deceive users into remaining on Bing.
> This morning, users are discovering that if they search for “Google” in the primary Bing interface, they’re shown a special Bing search page. Before you scroll down to the actual search results, you’re presented with an all-white page with a centered, unbranded search bar and a multicolored doodle above it that’s heavy on yellow, red, blue, and green.
What fraction even know the difference?
My guesses are not very big.