this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
89 points (94.9% liked)
Technology
84662 readers
3844 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're right, in the strictest IT-nerd sense, that when Bing singles out the "google" search query for special treatment, that one step doesn't involve "intercepting" anything.
But the Bing/Microsoft people are doing that to trick users who had intended to search Google into searching Bing instead. When it works, that's Bing intercepting the user's Google search, using social engineering rather than tech hacks.
If anything, that's just an indicator of Google's market dominance. Microsoft's actions are ethically dubious, but more countries need to adopt legislation in the style of the EU's Digital Services Act to promote competition to prevent consumers from assuming that Google is the sole means of searching online.