This is partly preying on the fact googles 'doodles' weaken their brand/trademark.
Back when every google doodle clearly had the word "Google" in, that was okay.
But often now, the doodles are just some random picture. At that point, there is no brand recognition to their homepage beyond a blank white background and centered search box, which microsoft has copied here because those elements alone are not enough to form a legally protectable brand.
I agree, but for the record, if Google wanted to sue, they wouldn’t be completely out of luck. They could make claims under the Lanham Act §1125(a), state unfair competition laws, or other fraud-adjacent laws. But they would have to prove that Microsoft was deceiving customers, and it would be a lot harder without an actual case of trademark infringement.
They could also try to claim trademark infringement based on the fact that Microsoft is hijacking searches for the keyword “google”. Courts have previously rejected trademark claims when a company takes out search ads using its competitor’s name as a keyword, but Google could argue that what Microsoft is doing here is more deceptive than that.
(IANAL and have only passing familiarity, but I’m fairly confident in the above.)
IANAL as well. but I have to say, if typing into typing Google into the Bing search and getting a page that looks almost exactly like Google can't be proven as intent to deceive, then the law is broken.
I can't imagine anything clearer to prove intent than a user requesting that they want to go to Google to Bing, Bing responds to that request by showing them a page that looks like Google's. That is so clear. Is that really not able to be proven in court?
In some ways it weakens their brand in that maybe it's easier to pretend to be them but in others it makes people feel good about them. I like the doodles.
I bet this is 100x+ more effective at keeping people on Bing than anything else MS has tried. Same idea as knock-off brands with labels and designs inspired by the name brand.
People may eventually realize they're not on Google, but probably only after being not displeased in Bing's results. If they have a bad experience, oh well, they were planning on using google anyway.
I consider Bing better in some areas, and equivalent in most others. Their image search is definitely better. Text search is... well, not good, but not any worse than Google.
They're really using every tactic they can -- and for the life of me, I have no idea why. They've pushed so hard, for so long, to make Bing succeed -- even forcing it in the Start menu -- and it's still not owning the search space.
In my opinion, they'd be much more effective if they just killed the Bing brand, killed Bing rewards, killed the Bing newsfeeds, rebranded it to "Private Search" at privatesearch.com, and called it a day. Yes, people have memories shorter than a goldfish.
Honestly whatever the hell Google offers at this point has been disguising itself as google search for years. It sure as shit is not what people expect from google.
I had similar thoughts; my gut says that this is bad behavior by Microsoft, but that what Google has done to their own supposed product is bad enough to justify it.
Nothing can keep me on Bing unless the results improve. Or am I the only one who regularily gives Bing a try only to find out the results are irrelevant?
It just seems I’m doing the google -> bing -> yandex thing a lot now.
And then I don’t bother with many competitors because they’re all bing based anyway.
Way down the list sometimes I resort to Brave search. Not because it’s good. But in fact, because it’s so bad, it might be indexing something the others tried getting rid of for a good year or two after everyone else tried to memory hole it.
Which has helped me pull cached versions of something interesting “to me” that wasn’t interesting enough for someone else to have gotten with archive.today
Think the most recent one I went down the whole rabbit hole on was a tv show called “that’s my bush” from Comedy Central. I was willing to buy them but they were Unobtainium. I did end up finding the episodes on archive.org and on torrents, via yandex. Great example of something harmless and hilarious that Big Social and Big Search just HAS to protect my delicate sensibilities and my fragile mind from.
Just to underscore how stupid and petty some of this stuff has gotten. Even if it’s not outright censorship of (at best) tangentially “political” content (they had planned on lampooning whoever won, thinking Al Gore was going to be president, and it’s the same guys who did South Park so it’s culturally and historically interesting to some of us) it proves how increasingly irrelevant Google has become.
Google and Bing both hid their availability on archive.org from me and I would not have thought to look there. Meanwhile, first hit on Yandex.
I use bing chat (ChatGPT something) cos it works without login. I have it on a shortcut search trigger in Firefox with temporary tab containers. Replaced more than 50% of my searches, I use Kagi for the rest.
Honestly, I'm under the impression they've converged so much recently I can't be bothered to switch on my work machine, and I don't think this is because Bing is getting better.
I think there are a few areas where Google still has an advantage (if I search with a city name, Google will match results to the city my IP address is located on and not a smaller, less significant one in the United States) but I think their self promotion and AI Q&A bullshit in results is actually worse.
I started a new job and the browser default was set to Edge. I never bothered to change it and defaulted to using Bing for search. TBH, I don't notice a difference in results.
yeah I also did this again recently. Google was getting too heavy-handed with their impossible captchas, so I switched to Bing for a while, once again thinking that it can't be as bad as I remembered. honestly it was okay for a while, but Bing - and every other alternative I've tried - still really struggles with any query where a vital part of the meaning is captured by the structure of the sentence rather than the keywords alone.
Disclaimer - I used to work on Bing like... 8 years ago.
There's probably some debate around whether this is nefarious or genius, but I'd lead towards the later. "google" has always been one of the number one search terms, and the amount of people who would open chrome, search for google in the address bar, then open google in the google search results, then do their search, was wild. There's a very large percentage of less technical people who aren't looking for Google, they're looking for search, and in their mind the two are the same.
They likely don't care what search engine they're using, so I suspect this actually captures a very large amount of search volume, while still solving the intent of the user.
Disclamer - I owned a restaurant that gave Pepsi products to customers who explicitly ask for a Coke.
There's probably some debate about whether this is nefarious or genius, but I lean towards the later. "Coke" has always been the number one request from our patrons, and the amount of people who just wanted any soda but said "coke" was wild. there's a very large percentage of poorly palated patrons who aren't looking for a Coca-Cola, they're looking for a soda, and in their mind the two are the same.
They likely don't care which soda they're drinking, so I suspect this actually captures a very large amount of soda sales, while still solving the intent of the patron.
What's that? There's a process server outside? Whatever for?
A perfect analogy, if I were to trust the glass with my deepest darkest secrets, had a relationship with it going back decades, expect it to point me to the right direction and keep track of much of my correspondence, and so on and so forth.
OK, maybe a glass of soft drink somehow doesn’t do that, but I suppose it’s perfect analogy adjacent.
I don't see anything wrong with that. Coke is pretty much generic term. And Pepsi and Coke and other brands of cola flavored sweetened water are all pretty much the same.
People shouldn't be drinking this stuff at all anyways. It should be mandatorily white labeled anyways.
I definitely get what you're saying - there's an element here of taking what a customer asks for and returning something different, but I think it's an imperfect analogy.
It's not bringing them a Coke, it's bringing them a dispenser that says "Cola" next to a fridge with options. For people who just want Cola, it's immediately available. For those with a brand choice, there are additional options.
The reality I'm trying to portray though is that the demographic of people who search "Google" in a search field rarely overlaps with the demographic of people who are opinionated about their search tool, so this ends up serving a segment of the population in the way they expected.
> They likely don't care what search engine they're using
That's nothing, for our next iteration our navigation system will take you to the nearest Woolworths because they've got a commercial partnership with us even though the customer quite clearly said 'Coles'. It's likely they don't care.
Huh, imagine if current operating system trends are applied to car computers. "To store your seat settings across reboots, get our Comfort subscription. [Subscribe] [Not Now]".
In fact, how shitty have OSes become that they are nagware now?
If you want to make it more accurate, the car started in the Woolworths parking lot or something. But that doesn't capture many of the other aspects. Hmm.
My best attempt at this car analogy is more like... you walk over to some idling Lyft drivers and say you need an Uber to Coles. And then one of them drives you to Coles instead of driving you to the nearest Uber idling spot.
Older people don’t understand the idea of “search engine”, they understand “google”. They don’t realize you can “google” through Bing as well. I hate it, but it is what it is.
The ones debating whether this is nefarious or not are the ones ruining the tech industry. This is absolutely nefarious. Whether or not it's a clever path to promotion due to corporate incentives is irrelevant.
I'm curious what part of Microsoft's culture enables these satirically slimy product decisions. In theory, other megacorps should be no better, but somehow they seem to maintain a bar that Microsoft always manages to stoop below
With all due respect, still feels bs to rationalizing the intentional misleding of these poor people. It is not a coincidence that Google and search is the same in their heads.
Is it bad to mislead these poor people when the outcome is better? Google is not good at returning results and is exceptionally good at directing nontechnical users to malicious ads. Bing is saving people.
If a user is not equipped to determine the difference between Google and Bing, you should not redirect them to a website which is 80% ads.
I used Bing on mobile for a while, and I quickly noticed a horrible dark pattern: the mobile website has a little banner that pops up at the top prompting you to download their app, but this banner only loads in after a short delay (maybe half a second) after the rest of the page. In particular, it shows up right where the search bar was (pushing the bar downwards) - meaning that if I aim for the search bar right when the page loads, I often end up hitting the banner ad right as it loads in. I’ve probably loaded their App Store page a dozen times at this point by accident - it’s that annoying.
I swear this is deliberate. There’s not really any good reason for a delay on the “you should get our app” banner that I can see, and even less of a good reason to have it load at the exact position of the search bar. Some engineer in Redmond is probably feeling really good about tricking people this way…
Fun fact: Microsoft Ads (the place you go to buy ads on Bing) is essentially a carbon copy of Google Ads in every way imaginable. The UI is, quite literally, exactly the same. The names of the features are nearly identical. There is very little differentiation, and it's 100% by design - doing this makes it very easy for marketing people to switch between ad platforms without needing to learn a completely new interface.
It's quite entertaining to watch. Google will release a feature, and then a few weeks later Microsoft announces the exact same thing.
Microsoft is learning that copying success is often easier than creating it from scratch. Making their products look identical to Google's makes it a lot easier to switch between the 2.
They've always used copying as one of their signature moves, see zune vs ipod, win3/95 vs mac, early Internet explorer based on spyglass/NCSA mosaic, Novell eDirectory vs ActiveDirectory, C# vs Java, F# vs Ocaml, and many more I would have to think hard about and take a long time to remember.
They tend to enter late with a me-too product, whether they copy, acquire, or embrace-extend-extinguish, but copying does play as large a role as any of their strategies, none of which generally involve actual innovation and often lean heavily on illegal, underhanded, or unethical business tactics.
Please try using F# or C# for once and you'll see how incorrect this statement is. Both had huge amounts of novel work that influenced the whole industry.
Adversarial compatability is not a reason to mock a competitor to an entrenched monopoly.
I have no love for Microsoft, but the idea that a locked in monopoly, responsible for tainting or outright destroying huge swaths of the internet, is a "success"...
Not gonna lie though. Making a fake page that looks like a competitor to show people after they ask you to give them their competitors site is very mockable.
I see the similarities between these situations, but the difference is deception, Not that it's "copying".
I prefer bing + copilot as a search engine over google if I must use one. Been using it since the beta, have a corporate/business account now. It (usually) provides a good description of my answer and gives sources I can click on to verify. No other search engine I am aware of is doing this right now, although I know chatGPT has recently introduced or talked about a feature like this (I don't really use chatGPT). This is exactly what I want in a good search tool. However, my frustration with bing arises in that from one day to the next there is absolutely no consistency in how "good" the tool feels - almost like there are times they downgraded the underlying model to reduce load/cost without informing the user. They should focus on a better user experience than google, which if I can interject my opinion, is a shockingly low bar these days, and let growth happen by simply being a good tool - all the gimmicks and attempts they've made at mass adoption has seemed very forced. And yes, I'm aware of the natural lock-in advantage google has and how hard that is to surmount, but bing has a large enough percentage of search userbase by now to achieve its own critical mass if it needed to, IMO. Forcing adoption and locking it into microsoft ecosystem will probably eventually be the reason I stop using it.
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Back when every google doodle clearly had the word "Google" in, that was okay.
But often now, the doodles are just some random picture. At that point, there is no brand recognition to their homepage beyond a blank white background and centered search box, which microsoft has copied here because those elements alone are not enough to form a legally protectable brand.
They could also try to claim trademark infringement based on the fact that Microsoft is hijacking searches for the keyword “google”. Courts have previously rejected trademark claims when a company takes out search ads using its competitor’s name as a keyword, but Google could argue that what Microsoft is doing here is more deceptive than that.
(IANAL and have only passing familiarity, but I’m fairly confident in the above.)
I can't imagine anything clearer to prove intent than a user requesting that they want to go to Google to Bing, Bing responds to that request by showing them a page that looks like Google's. That is so clear. Is that really not able to be proven in court?
Bill Gates, the friendly philanthropist, was/is a business criminal. His company hasn't changed.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/microsoft-agrees-pay-20-milli...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
They waged a war of "FUD" against open-source software.
https://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/57261/index.html
And so on.
And Google is hardly a saint either. "Do no evil" was just marketing from that surveillance advertising firm.
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People may eventually realize they're not on Google, but probably only after being not displeased in Bing's results. If they have a bad experience, oh well, they were planning on using google anyway.
Dead Comment
And then I don’t bother with many competitors because they’re all bing based anyway.
Way down the list sometimes I resort to Brave search. Not because it’s good. But in fact, because it’s so bad, it might be indexing something the others tried getting rid of for a good year or two after everyone else tried to memory hole it.
Which has helped me pull cached versions of something interesting “to me” that wasn’t interesting enough for someone else to have gotten with archive.today
Think the most recent one I went down the whole rabbit hole on was a tv show called “that’s my bush” from Comedy Central. I was willing to buy them but they were Unobtainium. I did end up finding the episodes on archive.org and on torrents, via yandex. Great example of something harmless and hilarious that Big Social and Big Search just HAS to protect my delicate sensibilities and my fragile mind from.
Just to underscore how stupid and petty some of this stuff has gotten. Even if it’s not outright censorship of (at best) tangentially “political” content (they had planned on lampooning whoever won, thinking Al Gore was going to be president, and it’s the same guys who did South Park so it’s culturally and historically interesting to some of us) it proves how increasingly irrelevant Google has become.
Google and Bing both hid their availability on archive.org from me and I would not have thought to look there. Meanwhile, first hit on Yandex.
I think there are a few areas where Google still has an advantage (if I search with a city name, Google will match results to the city my IP address is located on and not a smaller, less significant one in the United States) but I think their self promotion and AI Q&A bullshit in results is actually worse.
There's probably some debate around whether this is nefarious or genius, but I'd lead towards the later. "google" has always been one of the number one search terms, and the amount of people who would open chrome, search for google in the address bar, then open google in the google search results, then do their search, was wild. There's a very large percentage of less technical people who aren't looking for Google, they're looking for search, and in their mind the two are the same.
They likely don't care what search engine they're using, so I suspect this actually captures a very large amount of search volume, while still solving the intent of the user.
There's probably some debate about whether this is nefarious or genius, but I lean towards the later. "Coke" has always been the number one request from our patrons, and the amount of people who just wanted any soda but said "coke" was wild. there's a very large percentage of poorly palated patrons who aren't looking for a Coca-Cola, they're looking for a soda, and in their mind the two are the same.
They likely don't care which soda they're drinking, so I suspect this actually captures a very large amount of soda sales, while still solving the intent of the patron.
What's that? There's a process server outside? Whatever for?
OK, maybe a glass of soft drink somehow doesn’t do that, but I suppose it’s perfect analogy adjacent.
I have in fact heard "coke" used as a generic before. Just like google, kleenex, champaign, cheddar, ...
People shouldn't be drinking this stuff at all anyways. It should be mandatorily white labeled anyways.
It's not bringing them a Coke, it's bringing them a dispenser that says "Cola" next to a fridge with options. For people who just want Cola, it's immediately available. For those with a brand choice, there are additional options.
The reality I'm trying to portray though is that the demographic of people who search "Google" in a search field rarely overlaps with the demographic of people who are opinionated about their search tool, so this ends up serving a segment of the population in the way they expected.
Did you tell them they were drinking Pepsi or ask some variant of "Is Pepsi okay?"
You should look into writing poetry. ;D
That's nothing, for our next iteration our navigation system will take you to the nearest Woolworths because they've got a commercial partnership with us even though the customer quite clearly said 'Coles'. It's likely they don't care.
In fact, how shitty have OSes become that they are nagware now?
My best attempt at this car analogy is more like... you walk over to some idling Lyft drivers and say you need an Uber to Coles. And then one of them drives you to Coles instead of driving you to the nearest Uber idling spot.
Machiavellian, even.
https://ianchadwick.com/machiavelli/chapters-15-21/chapter-1...
I'm curious what part of Microsoft's culture enables these satirically slimy product decisions. In theory, other megacorps should be no better, but somehow they seem to maintain a bar that Microsoft always manages to stoop below
The fact windows is full of dark patterns to try and get you to use it is pathetic disrespectful hubris not genius.
If a user is not equipped to determine the difference between Google and Bing, you should not redirect them to a website which is 80% ads.
I swear this is deliberate. There’s not really any good reason for a delay on the “you should get our app” banner that I can see, and even less of a good reason to have it load at the exact position of the search bar. Some engineer in Redmond is probably feeling really good about tricking people this way…
It's quite entertaining to watch. Google will release a feature, and then a few weeks later Microsoft announces the exact same thing.
Microsoft is learning that copying success is often easier than creating it from scratch. Making their products look identical to Google's makes it a lot easier to switch between the 2.
They tend to enter late with a me-too product, whether they copy, acquire, or embrace-extend-extinguish, but copying does play as large a role as any of their strategies, none of which generally involve actual innovation and often lean heavily on illegal, underhanded, or unethical business tactics.
Props for one of the rare times they apparently thought a UI through.
I have no love for Microsoft, but the idea that a locked in monopoly, responsible for tainting or outright destroying huge swaths of the internet, is a "success"...
Not gonna lie though. Making a fake page that looks like a competitor to show people after they ask you to give them their competitors site is very mockable.
I see the similarities between these situations, but the difference is deception, Not that it's "copying".
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I wonder if Brave is specifically deleting this element.
Looks like it's targeting #b_pole ("Promoted by Microsoft")
-- Dr. Adrian Mallard