Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers

Microsoft would really, really, really like you to use Bing, its self-branded search engine that competes against Google’s monopoly. Not only is it hardwired into much of Windows and other Microsoft products like the Edge browser, it also employs a lot of sneaky visual tricks to steer you away from Google itself. But the company’s latest trick is more, well, tricky — in fact, it’s just straight-up Google camouflage.

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.

It is, in a very practical and (in this writer’s opinion) deliberate sense, a clone of the familiar Google search page. If you aren’t paying attention, you might put in a search or two in this disguised bar without ever realizing that you haven’t actually left Bing itself. You’ll have to scroll up or down to notice something’s off, if you haven’t immediately seen that it’s basically a knock-off Google doodle.

The change was noted by Windows Latest (via 9to5Google), which also points out that this page appears whether you’re going to Bing.com directly or searching from the Edge combined search/URL bar. The only place it doesn’t appear is if you’re searching from an Edge tab in which you’ve already signed into a Microsoft account. A little testing on my part verifies these parameters. (I’m seeing the “I can’t believe it’s not Google” search page in Vivaldi, even though I’m signed into my work Outlook account.)

This dedicated “I can’t believe it’s not Google” search page does not seem to appear for any searches less specific than “google,” “google search,” etc. Even something only slightly less immediate, like “google mail,” gives you the regular Bing interface and results.

The intent seems pretty obvious here, and it’s a very desperate look on the part of Microsoft. Not that I blame anyone for feeling a little desperate in the face of Google’s search dominance. I didn’t call it the Google monopoly idly, because that’s the official determination of a United States federal court. Google controlled an astonishing 95 percent of the mobile search marketplace as of 2024 according to Statista, a number that has barely moved since 2015, with Bing claiming less than one percent despite 15 years of Microsoft backing. The results are slightly less bleak if you look at the desktop search market, where Google has “only” 82 percent to Bing’s growing 10.51 percent share as of early 2024.

So, yeah, I don’t envy the Bing team’s task of slaying giants. But that being said, if a user wants Google and they search Bing to get it, deliberately obfuscating the search seems like a failure of a search engine’s sole task. Microsoft is putting its business goals above its users, a strategy that never endears users to the product.

Considering how poorly Microsoft’s push to move people off of Windows 10 is going, I wonder if they might benefit from a bit of serious introspection on this approach.