You can also see it for yourself without needing Windows or Edge by opening https://www.bing.com/search?q=google in Linux Chromium for example.
Being charitable you could see that as a tribute to Google to mirror their doodles.
Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
111–120 of 229 posts
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Far less than the time saved had they received Google's results instead of Bing's inferior ones.
Are Google results good? I stop using Google years ago because of the garbage results (a lot of spam sites that were just serving data crawled from Github and other sites).
My primary search engine as of now is DDG, Their results are mostly fine (and powered partly by Bing). When their results are not good enough, I ask Google; often, but not always, it's better. For some other kinds of queries, Google fares notably worse than DDG, likely because SEO tricks are disproportionately directed against Google, and not always work against other search engines as effectively.
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Far less than the time saved had they received Google's results instead of Bing's inferior ones.
Are Google results good? I stop using Google years ago because of the garbage results (a lot of spam sites that were just serving data crawled from Github and other sites).
[deleted]
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#114Disclaimer - I used to work on Bing like... 8 years ago. 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…
The ones debating whether this is nefarious or not are the ones ruining the tech industry. This is absolutely nefarious. Whether or not it's a clever path to promotion due to corporate incentives is irrelevant.
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
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#115This is so desperate I feel bad for them
Everything they've done for the past few years has been desperate. 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…
It feels really sad and pathetic when a massive company desperately begs you to do something, not just Microsoft. Please install this! Please don't disable that! Please allow this permission! We really want you to do this! I would say "have some class" but class doesn't make stonk price go up.
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#116I 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.
They're really using every tactic they can -- and for the life of me, I have no idea why. They've pushed so hard, for so long, to make Bing succeed -- even forcing it in the Start menu -- and it's still not owning the search space.
In my opinion, they'd be much more effective if they just killed the Bing brand, killed Bing rewards, killed the Bing newsfeeds, rebranded it to "Private Search" at privatesearch.com, and called it a day. Yes, people have memories shorter than a goldfish.
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Far less than the time saved had they received Google's results instead of Bing's inferior ones.
Are Google results good? I stop using Google years ago because of the garbage results (a lot of spam sites that were just serving data crawled from Github and other sites).
I've had my issues with Google ever since they ran a series of ads pretending to be for Blender but actually linking to a scam site. (I’m not sure if it’s gotten better since then.) While I do occasionally come across questionable ads on Bing, they’re definitely much less frequent. For what it’s worth, I’ve switched to using Edge as my browser as well, largely because Google refuses to address one of the most frustrating issues with its external link profile behavior. Specifically, Google forces external links to open in the last-used profile, rather than letting you choose, whereas Edge allows you to customize this behavior.
On top of that, Bing’s deep search feature has proven to be genuinely useful
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Far less than the time saved had they received Google's results instead of Bing's inferior ones.
Are Google results good? I stop using Google years ago because of the garbage results (a lot of spam sites that were just serving data crawled from Github and other sites).
I wrote https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2020-12-05-ddg-vs-google/ in 2020. The tl;dr is that Bing's (DuckDuckGo's) results were garbage and Google was giving the correct answer within the first five results.
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.
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#119You can also see it for yourself without needing Windows or Edge by opening https://www.bing.com/search?q=google in Linux Chromium for example.
Interestingly that doesn't work on Brave Windows (Chromium) but works on Chrome Windows. I wonder if Brave is specifically deleting this element.
Interesting. uBlock Origin is hiding the element. At first I wasn't able to see the search box, but I can see it if I toggle cosmetic filtering.
Looks like it's targeting #b_pole ("Promoted by Microsoft")
Re: Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers
#120I'm surprised more startups don't just copy the most famous landing page of all time.
Well currently, every chatbot has seemingly copied the now famous chatgpt layout. Making it a defacto.