Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
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.)
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.
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.
I'm pretty awful at business because I always fix my mistakes for free and don't hide them behind fake "scope change" arguments that so many other vendors do.
I'm just saying the reality of it.
Also I don't think nepotism/giving work to friends is actually criminal in a lot of cases?
In some cases not as much.
It represents the appearance or actuality of kick backs and favoritism for "other" non-business reasons.
Put your mistress on the payroll? Why not! Put your 'can't get a job' brother on the payroll? Why not?!
The "princeling" hire is a classic form of quid pro quo hire - you hire Bidens coke&hookers son, his dad says hi to you on the golf course.
Nothing to see here.
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?
Gosh. I guess we're all robber barons at heart.
I guess when PG&E legally ignores requirements to trim electrical lines and people die, well the CEO didn't get any criminal charges, so the dead can be comforted that being burned alive wasn't done by a "criminal" quote un quote.
We all cause people to die by our greed... sometimes.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
But I'm mostly searching for tech stuff. Local content, or answering questions, google is better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, how shitty have OSes become that they are nagware now?
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.
The fact windows is full of dark patterns to try and get you to use it is pathetic disrespectful hubris not genius.
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
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.
Did you tell them they were drinking Pepsi or ask some variant of "Is Pepsi okay?"
A pretty common interaction is:
Me: Can I have a coke?
Waiter: Is pepsi okay?
Me: That's fine
Waiter: brings a Pepsi
It seems that the above commentor doesn't have this exchange but instead silently substitutes.
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.
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
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.
Props for one of the rare times they apparently thought a UI through.
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".
-- Dr. Adrian Mallard
I wonder if Brave is specifically deleting this element.
Looks like it's targeting #b_pole ("Promoted by Microsoft")
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.
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.
- no one ever
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.
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.
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.
They could at least get closer tho...
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.
It's a branding thing at this point. If it still worked, it'd be interesting to know if what they consider the highest ranked result is the topmost placed ad or the first result that's not an ad.
Funny that's already so intuitive for how touch interfaces works, I guess it would take maybe a week to change but forever to decide what specifically precisely should be done, so if it's not something epoch-defining, world-changing and comparable to search itself, then maybe just leave it, lest you make a mistake that half the customers likes.
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.
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.
Bing.com will never not be associated with Ned Ryerson ...
Doesn't matter how much they disguise it!
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!
<style>
body {
transform: rotate(1deg)
}
</style>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.
— 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.
What makes you believe that? It's pretty clearly intentional even if it only applies to Chromium browsers.
> 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.
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.
What fraction even know the difference?
My guesses are not very big.