Bing Has a New Trick to Make You Think You’re Using Google

Microsoft wants Windows users to use Edge and Bing for online browsing and search. Apparently, the company is no less than capable of taking steps that (at best) confuse people who aren’t tech savvy, and at worst mislead them into thinking they’re at Google.

Looks like Google Search (but is actually Bing!)

If you have a Windows PC, use the Microsoft Edge browser, and haven’t changed your default search engine, you’re probably searching using Microsoft’s Bing search engine. If you want to search on Google, type “Google” in the address bar to search for the term using your default search engine: Bing.

This is all good – after all, Bing is still a good search engine, and Google sometimes provides search results that should not be trusted. However, Microsoft just made a confusing change that made the “Google” search results page look like a Google search page even though it’s still Bing.

Bing’s results page for “Google” is different from other searches, including other search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo!. The Google search results page displays an image of a group of people that resembles a Google Doodle, and below it there is a search input field where you can enter search queries. However, when you enter what you want to find here, you will get search results from Bing, not Google.

Most tech-savvy users will easily see this – or, more likely, it won’t affect them since they probably use Google as their default search engine. Unfortunately, the average person may not know or notice this difference and end up mistakenly using Bing instead of Google.

This likely won’t affect the outcome you’re looking for, but the fact that Microsoft is using tactics like this to keep people inside its ecosystem is troubling. After all, this is one of the types of phishing attacks which scammers use to obtain confidential information and steal your money. While Microsoft won’t ask for your Google account username and password and steal from you, the fact that it uses a similar technique is questionable.

Therefore, to ensure that you are visiting the correct website, always remember to double check your browser’s address bar before clicking anything. This way, you’ll know you’re exactly where you want to be and won’t be tricked into visiting a page that looks similar.