M icrosoft has a suite of software services that aim to steal a slice of the pie from their Google counterparts. However, sometimes the Redmond giant resorts to potentially dishon

Microsoft has quietly killed off its spoofed Google UI that it was using to trick Bing users into thinking they were using Google. Earlier this month you could search for “Google” on Bing and get a page that looked a lot like Google,

Edge users earlier this month noticed that searching for Google would load the result in Bing, but with a spoofed Google UI. This appeared to be a way to trick people into believing that they were using Google.

Last week, journalists exposed a deceptive practice by Microsoft, which was aimed at attracting new users to Bing by essentially disguising the search

Microsoft has quietly removed a deceptive user interface (UI) that mimicked Google 's look on its search engine, Bing. The move comes after the misleading UI was first spotted by Reddit users earlier this month.

Windows Latest first spotted the situation, describing it as a “genius move to keep you from Google search.” It’s part of a larger pattern by Microsoft to get Google users to switch to Edge and Bing, taking advantage of their positions as the default browser and search engine in Windows.

This type of strategy is sometimes called a “dark pattern,” or a deceptive pattern that tricks users into doing something they did not intend. Below the Google-looking search bar, including a Google Doodle-esque cartoon, regular Bing results are displayed.

Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that looks an awful lot like... Google.

A week ago, people started noticing that if you searched the word Google on Bing, you'd get a result displaying a search box that looked suspiciously like Google Search, complete