• Searching ‘google’ on Bing shows something that’s only Google-like.
• Microsoft tries to fool the unwary and un-logged-in.
• Search in a general decline of its own making.

With web searches on the decline – gradually being usurped by queries to AI engines – Microsoft has developed a new tactic to keep users on bing.com, the company’s home-spun search engine. Searches for the phrase ‘google’ typed into bing.com (for users not logged into their Bing account) now produce a page that seems to have been designed to look like the Google search home page.

The Bing search bar remains on the page offered, but is only revealed if the user scrolls upwards. The graphics on show are oddly reminiscent of a Google Doodle, comprising a group of illustrated figures rendered in Microsoft’s recently-developed Fluent style. There’s plenty of familiar white space, and to the cursory eye, the page looks enough like google.com to be unremarkable.

Ensuing searches via the faux Google search field produce results curated by Bing, along with the raft of commercial posts that organisations have paid Microsoft to display.

Microsoft watchers will be aware that the company has used various tactics over the years to push its own products rather than show those of competitors, including opening links from its software in the Edge browser, not the user’s chosen default. The history of Microsoft is a litany of such practices: Among instances of anticompetitive practices too numerous to list, many Windows users have seen first-hand the digital panic that follows an attempt to download Chrome (or, heaven forfend, Firefox) as an alternative web browser.

Further back, the introduction of Internet Explorer made the browser the automatic default for millions of users and cemented the company’s position as a dominant technology player. It can take multinational government action such as that of the EU to remove such ‘features.’

The company’s latest tactic may not fool users even partially-conversant with web browsing, but large businesses like Microsoft tend not to release products without conducting research as to their efficacy. Microsoft must feel like it’s worth its while to subvert what a naive user wants and perform its latest switch-and-bait manoeuvre – at least until there’s a significant volume of protest from annoyed users, as exhibited most recently with the Copilot rewind feature which the company partially rolled back from general release.

Search engine results pages are increasingly important to Google, which is seeing a decline in revenue from its other online advertising activities. Yet search results on both Google and Bing have long ceased providing worthwhile information, preferring revenue (paid-for advertising) over relevance, with the latter usually of questionable quality, thanks to sites ‘optimising’ their content for SERP inclusion.

The way that both Microsoft and Google seem convinced they will keep web surfers using search engines is the addition of a layer of AI that predigests poor-quality search results and summarises them badly. Ironically, keeping users on the search engine pages for ‘answers’ discourages content creators, as with no need for click-throughs to originating sites, there’s little impetus for posting anything new to the web.

With a new generation of internet users preferring TikTok and Instagram to conduct their searches, the machinations of Microsoft and Google in the search space look increasingly like the last passengers on a sinking ship squabbling over the remaining rations.

Readers interested in using a service that works like a search engine rather than a proxy for commercial interests (or as an illustration for LLMs’ failings) may wish to investigate Qwant, Kagi, Searx, Mojeek or (for now, at least) Perplexity.