Bing intercepts the query
I’m by no means a supporter of Microsoft, but most search engines don’t redirect users to a company’s website just by entering their name as the search query. It’s not ‘intercepting’ anything, just adding a search widget to the results page.
You’re right, in the strictest IT-nerd sense, that when Bing singles out the “google” search query for special treatment, that one step doesn’t involve “intercepting” anything.
But the Bing/Microsoft people are doing that to trick users who had intended to search Google into searching Bing instead. When it works, that’s Bing intercepting the user’s Google search, using social engineering rather than tech hacks.
If anything, that’s just an indicator of Google’s market dominance. Microsoft’s actions are ethically dubious, but more countries need to adopt legislation in the style of the EU’s Digital Services Act to promote competition to prevent consumers from assuming that Google is the sole means of searching online.
Intercept isn’t the right word, but what they are doing is shady. The Bing search result for “Google” has results pushed down until they are nearly off the screen. They place what looks like a Google doodle (exploiting the fact that Google replaces their logo all the time) and a search box in the middle of the screen. It tricks the inattentive user into thinking it did what they meant for it to do, while still keeping them in Bingland.
The problem from a user interface perspective is that the search bar and the url are the same field. I don’t have edge, but what happens if they type “Google” into the url bar vs “Google.com” vs “https://google.com”/.
I have this problem at home when I try to go to a device on my lan, like how “http://jellyfin.lan”/ works but “Jellyfin.lan” takes me to a search page.
You can just add a trailing slash and most browsers will interpret it as an address.
‘jellyfin.lan/‘
Let the corporations fight!
Every search brings you closer to a free donation to a non-profit
I mean, yeah, it’s Microsoft. But still.
Considering all that Nadella cares about is subscription revenue, I have no idea how Bing still exists. Are they planning to shoehorn Copilot into it at some point?
it uses copilot the same way google uses gemini in search result. usually top result on the page.
I’m surprised they haven’t already (I don’t use either so wouldn’t know)
