Microsoft has suddenly backtracked after being caught “ tricking ” users, with a homepage designed to look and feel like Google’s own when Windows users searched for Google itself. The head of Chrome accused the Windows-maker of a “new year, new low,” criticizing its “long history of tricks to confuse users and limit choice.”

Google accused Microsoft of attempting to deceive people recently with a Bing interface that looks like the UI of Google. Microsoft appears to have rolled back the interface.

Microsoft has a habit of using a variety of tricks to convince people to keep using the defaults of Bing and Microsoft Edge in Windows, including modifying Chrome download sites and using malware-like popups to get people to ditch Google. Microsoft has even previously had to reverse pop-up ads inside Google Chrome to address “unintended behavior.”

Every day, it feels like we're hitting new levels of cultural division—with government officials taking to platforms to dunk, for some reason, and a rising tide of verbal slapfighting to which even your humble search engines are not immune.

To trigger the Google result, you must use Bing without logging into a Microsoft account (as first noted by WindowsLatest ). The Google result has a search bar, an image that looks suspiciously like a Google Doodle, and even some tiny text under the bar, creating a Google-like design.

In a blog post Thursday, Microsoft said it’s increasing the price of its Microsoft 365 bundle for consumers by $3 a month.

With added manga and snark. What's not to like? Opinion Windows 1 and 2 flopped almost as badly as OS/2 did. How did Microsoft stage one of the greatest comebacks ever with Windows 3?… Earlier this month,

About two decades ago, the conference rooms of Delhi institutions like the Sahitya Akademi and India International Centre were often haunted by a tall, thin and unfailingly polite gentleman with a briefcase who always sat at the back.

The danger for Google isn’t that it loses market share in search, but rather that search becomes subsumed within the broader category of AI. Just ask Microsoft about Windows PCs.

Microsoft 365 is getting a $3-per-month price increase for Copilot AI tools. Existing subscribers can opt out by jumping through hoops, but only for a limited time.

This, to me, makes even more sense. The asterisk on that statement is that it makes sense if the value is there. That is, if Google’s price hikes on each Workspace tier are reasonable, then it’s fine. $20 or $30 per month per user is too much. And, Google’s price hikes are reasonable. So we’re good on that one.

In its early days, the quirky tech startup known as Google adopted a visionary corporate credo: "Don't be evil." That later evolved into the motto: "Do the right thing," reflecting the idealistic ambitions of the company's founders that its technology could be a force for good.