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Microsoft Changing Users' Default Search Engine
BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."
It's already hard enough to switch to Google. Why is the most popular search engine at the bottom of the list? Could it be that it's weirdly labelled "Google Search Suggestions" unlike the very clear "Bing Search"? I thought that addon was just the suggestions the first time I saw it. If Google had started at the top then it would easily float there. Microsoft probably buried it so the Most Viewed providers would get viewed more and stay at the top.
If you're looking for video's I can't imagine using any other search engine then Bing right now. They're better at searching youtube then youtube is, and in a much friendlier manner.
For stuff other then videos, yeah, Google is king and will be for a loooong time.
They haven't just copied Google either.
The Bing Travel page is almost a pixel-perfect copy of the Kayak travel site.
It seems imitation is the strategy of the Bing team.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Nobody would care about MS having a monopoly if they actually made the best software. Or if they released all their software for free, as Google does.
which is totally what she said
I've had msnbot rejected from my site for many years. The just under a year ago I get a request from someone working for MSN Live Search asking to remove the block from robots.txt. I said, "no" and gave her the short version of my falling out with Microsoft (just the 1995 to 1998 subset).
Then I started getting hits from Bing. Their support site only mentioned msnbot gathering information, so how did my site get index? Well, this had to stop.
So, I wrote a filter that would redirect anything with a REFERER from bing.com to google.com with the same search query. After running for a few weeks now, I see that some IP addresses never return, but most come back from Google - often with more specific search queries than the first time. I still haven't heard a word from the confused Bing users about it, though. So I'm guessing that it works well for keeping the completely clueless out.