Justin Pot

You’re a person—I hope this is obvious to you. It’s not obvious to tech companies.

No, tech companies see you as a number.I used to work inside a tech company that was obsessed with metrics—design decisions were evaluated based on whether they made the right numbers go up. This philosophy, taken to its extreme, can prompt designers to completely go against the will of users. This can be a hard point to grasp. 

So I’m thankful to Microsoft, who earlier this year did something so egregious it made the point crystal clear. I’m talking about the time they made a fake Google homepage and showed it to everyone who searched for the word “Google”. 

You might, at first glance, think that you’re looking at Google’s homepage. There’s a search box, just like on Google’s homepage. There’s a mostly white backdrop, just like on Google’s homepage. There’s even a cutesy picture similar to the famous Google Doodles. 

Look at the address bar, though, and you’ll see this is in fact Bing. So, why did Microsoft do this? To trick people into using Bing. 

It’s really that simple. But why is anyone searching for Google on Bing in the first place? To explain why, we need to back up a bit. The word “Google” is one of the top searches on Bing—we’re talking millions of searches every month. This is because Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge, which in turn is the default browser on Microsoft Windows. Hundreds of millions of people use Windows every day. A lot of those people have installed Chrome, or changed the default search engine in Edge to Google; most have not. Microsoft, and all tech companies, know that the vast majority of people never change the default settings—they count on it. 

So: millions of people regularly open Microsoft Edge and type “Google” because that’s the search engine they want to use. Microsoft, however, does not want these people to use Google—they make more money if people use Bing. And that’s why the fake Google homepage exists: to trick people into using Bing. 

There is nothing illegal about this, to be clear, but it’s slimy. And it says a lot about where the big technology companies are at today. They’ve grown about as big as they can get, but they still seek indefinite growth. The result? They’re resorting to tricks to squeeze more out of their users. Someone at Microsoft noticed millions of people were searching for Google on Bing and, in an attempt to make a bit more money, mocked up something that could manipulate a few users. It’s cynical, sure, but it’s what you can expect from the big tech companies right now.