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Comment by styx31 | Hacker News Reader

No particular advice here, I just want to point to the fact that bing allows users to search their organization documents (office 365 files) when using bing [1] when connected with their org account. This feature is named "Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365". It's not mentionned in the article. See original ms doc article for details [2].

So it's not just a way to force users to use bing, it's also a way to push this feature in front of them.

> By making Bing the default search engine, users in your organization with Google Chrome will be able to take advantage of Microsoft Search, including being able to access relevant workplace information directly from the browser address bar. Microsoft Search is part of Microsoft 365 and is turned on by default for all Microsoft apps that support it.

[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/find-what-you-need-...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/microsoft-sear...

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I personally HATE features like this. I want a web search to return web results and file system search to return files. Novel behavior that mixes in unexpected search results (ie. web results when searching from the Windows 10 start menu) is deleterious and I do my best to train my brain to skip over those unexpected options.

It's more of intranet plus internet search. It may appear like filesystem but that is because it's searching internal services like SharePoint to the company that has chosen this integration.

It's also not mixed in, last I remember using this feature it was displayed in a banner section and made it really obvious these results came from a different sources.

Yup - Microsoft employee here but unaffiliated with that team. I love it, frankly. For large orgs that have thousands of SharePoint sites going back years(1), it's pretty fantastic. What would have been a dozen emails across two days to find some random doc explaining how to do something is now five to ten minutes of poking things into Bing.

1. TAM for this may be on the order of triple digits only for all I know, but if you work in a 50k+ knowledge worker org it's great.

Customer here... and, frankly, I hate it...

Now, not only is Microsoft weaponizing windows updates... they are weaponizing Office to push services without being asked?

I detest these dark patterns and decisions.

It's amazing how a company can make so many good decisions (IE: Open Source direction of .net) while also making such detestable decisions.

This may be difficult to grasp. But likely where you are seeing this feature is in a corporate setting where you are the "end user", not the paying customer. The corporate entity that is making use of this feature is who you should be protesting the use to, not Microsoft.

There's nothing "difficult to grasp" - these are shit decisions and dark patterns.

A feature that's MAYBE useful in a corporate setting to a hand full of people should not be a default defacto setting forced upon EVERYONE.

The issue isn't the feature... it's the default settings that enable invasive features.

is it the default to everyone or just o365 customers with intranet search content indexed?

Still no reason to force-push this onto users. If you are going to set up and maintain SharePoint servers and what not, you can surely change that browser preference yourselves, no?

Isn't it just a way to snoop on our file system searches? Oops, you were searching for a personal file but your query got sent to our server instead.

Isn't the point of this finding your personal file stored in the server?

We had that back like 10 years ago when google provided a tool (I forgot it's name, Google desktop search?) which scanned and indexed files locally. It was accessible through a shortcut, I laid mine to double-Ctrl and upon invocation it prompted a search bar

It was so great in search quality, number of formats it could index and performance that at one day I index the whole company file share. People showed up next to me and I rediscovered files which would have been lost otherwise.

This tool also integrated after configuration with the browser which issued an invocation to localhost to integrate local search results. As this was widely regarded as a terrible security feature to potentially tell google all about local files, reception of that feature was poor. This feature was the only incentive for google to provide the tool and therefore the tool got quickly axed.

I remember that tool and loving it, as well as anyone else I talked to about it. Computer file search was (and still kinda is) a big pain.

I used it to search my Thunderbird messages. It was much faster than Thunderbird's internal search. Luckily Mozilla improved its algorithm and its fast enough now.

I assumed the reason the tool got axed was because in short order, Microsoft released its own desktop search, and then integrated it into Windows (Vista?); and Apple added Spotlight to OS X. In retrospect it’s a little surprising to me that in just a couple of years, the notion of indexing your entire hard drive went from novel to taken for granted.

I think desktop search existed before Google's. But not a lot of people used it in my experience. I found Google's to be fantastic,a and it was nice it showed results in line with the mostly used search engine. I was surprised when they discontinued it too, and suspect it was some "gentlemen's (anti-consumer) agreement" between companies around turf.

My theory was that google saw it as a way to seed their drive service or the strategy changed and the future was not desktop

> This tool also integrated after configuration with the browser which issued an invocation to localhost to integrate local search results.

They had a similar tool to make some sites load faster. I suspect they embedded some of that to Chrome at some point.

Edit:

It was Google Web Accelerator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator

I think Google Desktop even injected results into Google's main page via a "layered service provider" at the TCP level - back before we all used SSL for everything.

Thanks to Search Everything I just dump all my files into Documents nowadays. I only care about a meaningful naming scheme.

Its not desktop it indexes your org files on intranet sites. If you are signed in with you corp account to bing all searches also bring back relevant internal org info.

I loved that app! I think my shortcut was Ctrl Space

Most of the time I knew exactly where the file was saved, but it provided an extremely quick way to open it without navigating folders

I think if the installer explains it clesrly and transparently then its fine. It should be entirely opt-in. Matter of fact default search engine should be entirely opt-in on first time use.

Microsoft needs to really do a better job with these sort of decisions to make sure they arent stepping on a landmine.

Chrome also already has a feature for searching Drive files from the search bar[0], so it makes sense for MS to be on a level playing field.

0: https://9to5google.com/2019/12/02/chrome-google-drive-search...

Google's browser is Chrome.

Microsoft's is Edge.

I can't speak for anyone else by my Org's recommended browser is Chrome and it comes preinstalled along with a bunch of shitty Extensions you can't remove because Chrome respects GPO.

It's vaguely reminiscent of browsers in the early 2000s, it just needs Gator.

I like Chrome enterprise policies, even for personal use. Sucks that your org has done a terrible job forcing crappy extensions.

Edge is now Chromium, right?

Searching from the address bar, and changing the user's default search experience aren't the same thing.

If Microsoft was adding Bing as a search provider this wouldn't be nearly as controversial. Instead they're removing the user's preference and replacing it with their own, without consent, during a regular update of an unrelated product.

It is basically adware behaviour. Microsoft's self-rationalisation isn't relevant.

I'd call it malware behaviour, but I agree with your general point.

It's worth pointing out that the installer doing this is a business-only installer. So while, yes, it is removing the user's preference, it is also a corporate tool for enforcing corporate policies on corporate machines.

The issue here is that the install is not optional when it should be: admins should have the choice. But IMO it's debatable whether end users (of their corporate machines) should.

Opt-in and non-dark patterns is all we ask [1]. That plus a clean option to opt-out without breaking some wider integration.

[1] Assuming it provides legitimate business value in the first case

Exactly. This should be OPT-IN, period. If they do that, there's no problem.

> By making Bing the default search engine, users in your organization with Google Chrome will be able to take advantage of Microsoft Search,

Also, if you are not doing that, they will still be able to, just not directly from the browser address bar.

Things I don't want:

Searching 0365 when I try to do a search in the browser.

Searching with Bing when I want to search the web.

Searching in 0365 is useful; but this particular move is a doubly-negative way of surfacing the feature.

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