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Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers

pcworld.com

41–50 of 229 posts

Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers

#41

Removed. I see the scrolling happens for me in Chromium so that's not PCWorld's doing.

> the scrolling probably isn't intentional

What makes you believe that? It's pretty clearly intentional even if it only applies to Chromium browsers.

Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers

#44
post #41

Removed. I see the scrolling happens for me in Chromium so that's not PCWorld's doing.

> the scrolling probably isn't intentional What makes you believe that? It's pretty clearly intentional even if it only applies to Chromium browsers.

I was referring to PCWorld there. I've rephrased it. Hopefully it's a little clearer now.

Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers

#45
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just scroll past it you know

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.

Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers

#46
post #8

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.

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?

Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers

#48

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.

DuckDuckGo has served me pretty well for the past couple of years.

Also, their AI offering duck.ai is pretty solid as well.

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