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Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

docs.microsoft.com

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Re: Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

#21

Post by jbob2000 »

jabberwik wrote: post #16
jbob2000 wrote: post #12

Read the post before you get your knickers in a twist. The purpose of this change is so a special type of business client can allow their employees to search not just the web, but also their company’s internal resources. Considering that most businesses provide their employees with company laptops, this isn’t something that is going to affect consumers.

If I'm that special type of business client that is actually using Microsoft Search, cool, maybe I want an easy option to change the default engine. But that should be opt-in. Because Microsoft Search is also opt-in. They are deploying this to all O365 customers, regardless.

No they aren’t, read the post. It’s for ProPlus subscribers only, which is a plan that includes Microsoft search.

Re: Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

#22

Post by jlgaddis »

Someone1234 wrote: post #13

If you want to prevent this without installing the Office ADMX January update, you can set the following registry entry: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate] "preventbinginstall"=dword:00000001 Save the above in a .Reg file and execute.

FWIW, the (untested) PowerShell equivalent would be:

  New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate" -Name "preventbinginstall" -PropertyType DWord -Value 1

Re: Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

#23

Post by justinclift »

lorenzfx wrote: post #11

Isn't this behaviour making use of their market power and should be looked at by the antitrust authorities? Overriding user's preferences with a forced installation of an extension reminds me very much of the old Microsoft I had hoped was gone for good.

Co-incidentally, they've started using their Windows monopoly to push Office via adverts (eg in Wordpad) now too.

Hopefully the anti-trust / monopoly authorities do decide to pick this up, as it'll be the 2nd time around for MS.

They obviously didn't learn from the first, so the measures this time around will need to be much, much stronger. :)

Re: Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

#24

Post by tinus_hn »

anotheryou wrote: post #14
JohnFen wrote: post #10

At least they're warning us! Sadly, we're forced to use O365 where I work, so this makes me doubly glad that I don't use Chrome.

> Support for the Firefox web browser is planned for a later date.

I strongly doubt Chrome is going to support this and Firefox seems even less likely.

Re: Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

#25

Post by tinus_hn »

jbob2000 wrote: post #12

Read the post before you get your knickers in a twist. The purpose of this change is so a special type of business client can allow their employees to search not just the web, but also their company’s internal resources. Considering that most businesses provide their employees with company laptops, this isn’t something that is going to affect consumers.

For that special kind of business that can’t use group policy to set the search engine, surely.

Re: Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

#26

Post by chithanh »

falcolas wrote: post #7
greycol wrote: post #6

It might be a bit of a stretch but I wonder what standing someone has to sue when search results are noticeably worse and changed in this way. e.g. I just searched " emergency" in google and bing. Bing came up with a travel site and several news articles. Google came up with a map with the local emergency department as the highlighted pin and urgent care as subsequent pins. Google's little blurbs are also very handy…

> search results are noticeably worse This is not an endorsement of this article's allegations, or even of of Bing. But. DDG uses Bing as one of its primary sources of data, and IMO DDG results are better than Google's for me both professionally and personally today. Maybe DDG is doing some special sauce behind the scenes, or maybe they're blending results from multiple sources, but that quality of search means I'm n…

Can't confirm. I use DDG as default search provider and have to fall back to Google much more than I would like to.

Google is IME much better than Bing/DDG for local search results, and that has not changed a bit. Also, while DDG is indexing news websites and Wikipedia well enough, when it comes to more obscure wikis, article comments, or forum posts, the search results are often very incomplete.

Re: Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

#28

Post by brazzledazzle »

jbob2000 wrote: post #21
jabberwik wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm that special type of business client that is actually using Microsoft Search, cool, maybe I want an easy option to change the default engine. But that should be opt-in. Because Microsoft Search is also opt-in. They are deploying this to all O365 customers, regardless.

No they aren’t, read the post. It’s for ProPlus subscribers only, which is a plan that includes Microsoft search.

Pro plus is pretty much every business and university. It’s not like you buy pro plus for the amazing Bing integrations.
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