Same Spots. Same Leopard.

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series.

I asked a question back in March: can a user-hostile leopard change its spots? I was cautiously, skeptically willing to entertain the possibility. Microsoft had made noises about pulling Copilot back from its most obnoxious outposts. Pavan Davuluri said some words. I covered my skepticism in detail and left the verdict open.

Verdict's in.

Same spots. Same leopard.

Windows Latest confirmed it this week — fresh screenshots, InPrivate mode, May 2026 — that Bing is still running a spoofed Google homepage. Right now. Today. Eighteen months after the story supposedly ended.

Here's the full arc, because the revisionism matters.

Windows Latest first caught it on January 6th, 2025. Type "Google" into Bing while logged out of a Microsoft account, and instead of search results you got a costume: an all-white page, a centered unlabeled search bar, a colorful illustrated doodle heavy on yellow, red, blue, and green — the exact palette of a Google Doodle — and a small line of text underneath, just like Google.com. The page automatically and quickly scrolled down to hide Bing's own search bar at the top, pushing the one thing that would immediately give the game away off screen. JavaScript doing the quiet work of maintaining the illusion. If you used that search bar, you ran a Bing search. You never left. The URL bar was the only honest thing on screen.

The backlash was fast. Google Chrome's GM Parisa Tabriz called it out on X: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Microsoft spoofing the Google homepage is another tactic in its long history of tricks to confuse users and limit choice. New year; new low, Microsoft." Nine days later, on January 15th, the story was declared closed. Microsoft quietly removed the fake Google page — no statement, no apology, no acknowledgment it had ever existed. Every outlet wrote the postmortem. Microsoft backed down. Moving on.

Except they didn't move on. They just waited for everyone else to.

As of May 2026, the deceptive UI is still fully operational. Open Edge, type "Google" in the address bar, and Bing intercepts the query. The spoofed page features a clean, minimalist layout dominated by a large centralized search bar positioned directly underneath a simple illustration built to look like the ones Google makes. Type anything into it, and you've just done another Bing search. For signed-in users, Microsoft runs a slightly different version: a secondary search bar appears below where you already typed "Google," ready to capture whatever you search next. Logged out or logged in, there's a variant waiting. They didn't kill it. They iterated on it.

Now hold this next part in your head for a second. At the exact same time Microsoft is running this spoofed interface, the company is simultaneously running a $2 million sweepstakes campaign with a $1 million cash prize and three Mercedes-Benz vehicles — just to convince people to use Bing and Edge. The promotion closes May 21st, in case you're keeping score at home.

So the current Microsoft Bing user acquisition strategy is: trick you with a fake Google page, and also offer you a million dollars. Simultaneously. As a plan.

The original trigger was always surgically specific — it only fired for searches of "google" or "google search," nothing broader. Searching "google mail" gave you the regular Bing interface. Someone wrote a conditional for that exact query and shipped it. It went through design, engineering, QA, and deployment. It survived every internal review since January 2025. Whatever story Microsoft told externally about walking it back, internally nobody killed the flag.

The comparisons to adware were never unfair. Browser hijackers and shady toolbars have used these exact techniques for years — deceptive interfaces that redirect searches while pretending to be something else. Microsoft itself previously categorized exactly this behavior as malicious. The Ask.com toolbar, which hijacked browser homepages and search engines, was labeled as malware by Microsoft. They wrote the detection rule. Then they shipped their own version. Then they kept shipping it while everyone assumed the story was over.

Microsoft has invested nearly $100 billion in Bing across seventeen years. According to Google's own lawyers citing submitted evidence in EU antitrust proceedings, the most commonly searched word on Bing is "Google." The single most popular thing people do on Bing is try to leave it. That's the context inside which someone decided the answer was to redecorate the exit to look like the destination.

And to be genuinely fair about it — because this series tries to be — Microsoft IS doing real work on Windows 11 right now. Per the Windows Insider Blog, Copilot buttons have been quietly pulled from Snipping Tool, Photos, and Notepad. They're reducing the baseline memory footprint, improving File Explorer launch times, and moving core Windows experiences to WinUI 3 to cut interaction latency. The taskbar — locked to the bottom of the screen since Windows 11 launched — is finally getting top and side positioning back. The white "flash bang" bug in File Explorer has been fixed, archive format support has been expanded, and the underlying explorer.exe processes are more reliable. These aren't marketing slides. They're actual shipped fixes for actual longstanding frustrations, and they deserve acknowledgment.

Which is exactly what makes the Bing situation so maddening. There's a version of Microsoft that builds things people genuinely want to use, responds to feedback, and ships real improvements. That version exists and has been doing visible work this year. And then there's the version running a spoofed Google homepage and a million-dollar lottery simultaneously, in the same product portfolio, at the same company. Both are real. The leopard contains multitudes. But spots are spots, and the Bing team's have been showing for eighteen months while everyone assumed otherwise.

Microsoft makes gestures when the noise gets loud enough. Then the noise fades. Then they keep doing what they were doing. I said it covering the GitHub arc. I said it covering Recall. The fake Google page is just the clearest possible illustration of the math: make enough noise, they'll quietly flip a flag. Wait a few weeks. Flip it back.

That's not a company in the middle of a values shift. That's a company that has learned exactly how loud the backlash needs to get before a temporary retreat is worth the cost — and has calculated that in most cases, it isn't.

Same spots. Same leopard. The only thing that changed was who was watching.

Find me on Mastodon at @ppb1701@ppb.social. The thread keeps not running out.