Bing Tricking People Into Thinking They’re on Google
Tom Warren (tweet, Hacker News):
Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that looks an awful lot like… Google.
It’s a clear attempt from Microsoft to make Bing look like Google for this specific search query, and other searches just list the usual Bing search results without this special interface. The Google result includes a search bar, an image that looks a lot like a Google Doodle, and even some small text under the search bar just like Google does.
[…]
We’ve been cataloging every trick Microsoft has used to convince people to switch to Bing or Edge instead of Google and Chrome over the past few years. Microsoft has modified Chrome download sites, added pop-up ads into Google Chrome on Windows, injected polls into Chrome download pages, and even used malware-like popups to get people to ditch Google.
The autoscrolling moves the page down just far enough to move Bing’s own page header out of the viewable page content. But because they just autoscroll down from the Bing page header, as opposed to hiding it completely (say, using
display: nonein CSS) you can see it by just scrolling back up. But who thinks to scroll up immediately after typing a search term and hitting Return? (No one.) They even actually have the word “Google” and Google’s actual logo on the results page, in an “info box” for Google, the “American tech company”. See for yourself.It’s an exquisite dirty trick, and I’ll bet it actually works remarkably well. Google itself has long claimed that “google” is the most-searched-for term on Bing. I’ll bet that presenting the results for that search this way greatly increases the number of users who, thinking they’re actually now on Google, perform the search they intended to do on Google right there on Bing.
Microsoft is rolling out a new server-side update that could trick some people into using Bing as a default search engine in Google Chrome.
While using Google Chrome, I encountered a Bing pop-up on the right side of the browser. For a moment, I thought Chrome was infected with malware, but it turned out to be a new Microsoft campaign.
Via Nick Heer:
Speaking of things first-party platform vendors can do, this is an ad delivered by Windows within Chrome. Many things have changed since that antitrust trial, but something that remains the same is the contempt for users shown by corporate attempts to grab market share.
Following up on yesterday’s item regarding Bing masquerading as Google to trick Edge users into searching with it, this Mastodon post from Timo Tijhof lists a few other such subterfuge tactics they’ve pulled recently. My favorite was this one from last year: when users opened a tab for “bard.google.com”, Edge inserted an ad in the tab bar encouraging the user to “Compare answers with the AI-powered new Bing”. Ads in the tab bar, jeebus.
Previously:
- Microsoft Edge Slurps Tabs From Chrome Without Permission
- Vlad Prelovac on Kagi Search and Orion
- Microsoft-Trusted ICP-Brasil Certificate for google.com
- Microsoft Still Anti-Competitive
- Microsoft Edge Leaking Browsing History to Bing
- Microsoft Blocks EdgeDeflector to Force Windows Users Into Edge
- Microsoft Buys Corp.com
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Hmm. There must be some thing that happened in the last 2 months that gave all of the big tech companies the idea that they can do whatever they want without fear of US Government oversight or action.
