Microsoft seems to have provide you with a brand new trick to stop those that by chance find yourself on Bing from going to Google: just mimic the look of the Google homepage and hope nobody notices.
Bing.com visitors who search for “Google” while not signed in to their Microsoft accounts may notice something strange when they press the Enter key, as shown within the video below, captured by . The screen doesn’t just look suspicious Google doodlescomplete with a mostly blank white screen, a search bar, and text beneath it, however the regular top bar, which shows the regular Bing search bar and various ways to filter results, has been moved off the screen so as to add to the illusion.
Once you have finished hiding the actual Bing bar (the remaining search window is just one other Bing search box, not Google), there is no obvious Microsoft branding at first glance – only a small banner promoting Rewards points as a reason to “choose Microsoft Bing.” Searches on other search engines don’t return similar results, nor do any of our other search terms.
In short, given every thing Microsoft has tried to do and didn’t move Bing beyond where people go to get to Google, it seems Redmond’s latest ploy could also be to make the Bing homepage seem like Google to create familiarity or confusion.
Microsoft has been attempting to get people to ditch Google Chrome in favor of its own Internet Explorer alternative, Edge, and Google’s Bing search engine for a while now, with little success, after all.
Edge has hardly managed to maneuver the needle further browser market share in comparison with Chrome last yr despite trying tricks like putting Edge ads on the Google Chrome download page begging users not to desert it, forcing links to open in Edge as a substitute of the user’s preferred browser and importing Chrome data without user consent.
Similarly with Bing, Microsoft has tried such tricks pop-up ads for its own search engine as a substitute of Chrome on Windows computers, suggesting users set Bing as Chrome’s default search engine, partially to access Search results powered by GenAI. These tricks also didn’t work and Bing still captures less than 4 percent of the Internet search market.
Will this latest attempt – potentially misleading to those that aren’t paying close attention – repay? Probably not very big. It’s also unclear whether Microsoft will change course if people start listening to this trick: we asked but didn’t get a solution.
he also contacted Google to seek out out what it thought of attempting to imitate Microsoft – it’s, in spite of everything, the sincerest type of flattery – but received no response from the Chocolate Factory either. ®
