Last week, journalists exposed a deceptive practice by Microsoft, which was aimed at attracting new users to Bing by essentially disguising the search engine as its main competitor.
As a result, users who opened Bing without logging into a Microsoft account and searched via Google were redirected to a very similar page (having the same search panel and doodle as Google) — however, all further search attempts through it resulted in Bing search results.
As The Verge reports now, after the screenshots and videos widely spread in the media and social networks, Microsoft eventually removed the fake page, yet still has not made any comments on the matter. Meanwhile, Google has expressed its position regarding competitors quite clearly:
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but forging the Google homepage is yet another tactic in a long history of tricks (by Microsoft) aimed at confusing users and limiting choice.”
Indeed, such tricks are not new for Microsoft — for example, pop-up ads often appear in the Chrome browser on Windows suggesting a switch to Edge, and last year in January, the company began automatically transferring user tabs from Chrome to its own browser.
In November, the corporation extended its loyalty program that rewards people for using its software, and among those who “ditched” the Google search engine for Bing, they even promised to raffle $1 million.
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