Summary
- Microsoft Bing promotes Copilot over rival services in search results.
- Microsoft's default products often direct users to Bing, increasing traffic to the search engine.
- Microsoft has a history of promoting its products over competitors on Bing, indicating a continuation of this strategy.
Microsoft hasn't been on its best behavior with its search engine, Bing. Recently, the company has attempted some pretty sneaky tricks to get people to use its services over its competitors. Its main method of attack is to identify when you search for a rival product, then slip in something that promotes Microsoft's products instead. We had hoped that the company would stop this practice, but if a recent report were to be believed, the Redmond giant has returned to its old tricks by encouraging people to use Copilot.
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Microsoft Bing begins serving a Copilot widget at the top of search results for rivals
In a report by Neowin, weird things are happening if you dare search for one of Copilot's rival services using Bing. Instead of showing you the results at the top, Microsoft will show you a big, unmissable "Copilot" box. You can then enter your prompt into this box and have it answer your questions instead of whatever service you wanted in the first place.
Microsoft's trick is a little more nefarious than you may first think. A lot of its products, by default, open Bing when the user wants to search something. If you want to find something on the web via the Windows Search bar, it'll end up opening Bing. If you're using a public PC, you're likely stuck with using Microsoft Edge...which uses Bing as its default search engine.
As such, there's a lot of captive traffic going through Bing, which means that Microsoft can do some pretty sneaky tricks to encourage people to use its products over its competitors.
Microsoft Bing has a pretty crafty history
As we said earlier, this isn't the first time we've seen Microsoft do this with Bing. It wasn't that long ago that we saw Microsoft Bing make its best Google impression when people searched for Alphabet's famous search engine. It even came with its own convincing Google Doodle and everything.
Microsoft did eventually take down this little trick, and we had hoped that it meant that it was done trying to push its own products when people search for a competitor's products. However, with this new trick, it seems that we're not going to see the last of this particular strategy for a while.