If you can’t beat ’em, spoof ’em. At least, that appears to be Microsoft’s strategy for Bing, which now mimics the UI of Google.com when you search for “Google” on Bing.com.
As Windows Latest spotted early this week, Microsoft implemented a devious new plan to keep people from leaving Bing in favor of Google. Bing is the default search engine of Microsoft Edge, which is, in turn, the default browser on Windows 11. If you search for something in the address bar on Edge, you will be redirected to Bing.com to see the search results.
Of course, if you prefer to use Google, there’s a chance that one of your first and only searches on Bing will be for “Google,” so that you can bookmark it or even download Google’s Chrome to use as your default browser. Microsoft would prefer that you didn’t, so you might notice that the page looks suspiciously familiar when you search “Google” on Bing.
If you search for “Google” or “Google.com” on Bing, you’ll immediately be presented with a big animated picture of a group of people and a couple of cute animals. In fact, it looks a great deal like one of the Google Doodles you often see on Google’s homepage. It’s placed above a large, rounded search bar like the one on Google.com.
Even more cleverly, the page will automatically scroll down a tick once it finishes loading to hide the Microsoft Bing logo and the other search options.
Any other search will restore Bing’s standard UI. Compare the screenshot at the top of this post, where I was searching for Google, to this one of me searching for BGR:
Most of us would probably see right through this trick and click through to Google, but it’s not hard to see how some users could be fooled. After all, it looks close enough to Google that you might not notice at a glance. And unfortunately, many of us fall for far less clever tricks on a regular basis. Whatever the case, if this nefarious trick keeps even a small fraction of potential switchers from ditching Bing, it’s a win for Microsoft.
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