If you can't beat Google, trick your users into thinking that they're using Google.
This morning, users are discovering that if they search for “Google” in the primary Bing interface, they’re shown a special Bing search page. Before you scroll down to the actual search results, you’re presented with an all-white page with a centered, unbranded search bar and a multicolored doodle above it that’s heavy on yellow, red, blue, and green.
It is, in a very practical and (in this writer’s opinion) deliberate sense, a clone of the familiar Google search page. If you aren’t paying attention, you might put in a search or two in this disguised bar without ever realizing that you haven’t actually left Bing itself. You’ll have to scroll up or down to notice something’s off, if you haven’t immediately seen that it’s basically a knock-off Google doodle.
The change was
noted by Windows Latest (via
9to5Google), which also points out that this page appears whether you’re going to Bing.com directly or searching from the Edge combined search/URL bar. The only place it
doesn’t appear is if you’re searching from an Edge tab in which you’ve already signed into a Microsoft account. A little testing on my part verifies these parameters. (I’m seeing the “I can’t believe it’s not Google” search page in Vivaldi, even though I’m signed into my work Outlook account.)
This dedicated “I can’t believe it’s not Google” search page does not seem to appear for any searches less specific than “google,” “google search,” etc. Even something only slightly less immediate, like “google mail,” gives you the regular Bing interface and results.
