Microsoft is determined to ram its search engine Bing and its internet browser Edge down our throats by forcing Cortana on Windows 10 to use them exclusively whenever a user does a web search. Read on to find out more.
Cortana is Microsoft’s answer to Siri and Google Now. It’s a digital personal assistant that’s built into Windows 10 and can be used to search for anything on the internet and perform other tasks right from the operating system’s taskbar.
Previously, you could pick your preferred search engine and web browser to use with Cortana. Now when you use Cortana to perform searches, you’re only allowed to use Bing which will load results from the Edge browser.
Why is Microsoft doing this? The official line from the company is this:
“Unfortunately, as Windows 10 has grown in adoption and usage, we have seen some software programs circumvent the design of Windows 10 and redirect you to search providers that were not designed to work with Cortana. The result is a compromised experience that is less reliable and predictable. The continuity of these types of task completion scenarios is disrupted if Cortana can’t depend on Bing as the search provider and Microsoft Edge as the browser. The only way we can confidently deliver this personalized, end-to-end search experience is through the integration of Cortana, Microsoft Edge and Bing — all designed to do more for you.
Yes, Microsoft is doing this for your own good.
Sure, that might be one of the reasons for this dick move but the company can’t deny that this was at least in part motivated by the desire to increase the marketshare for Bing and Edge.
This is a disappointing development. Personally, I love Cortana and it’s many capabilities but I detest Bing and I have no interest in Microsoft Edge, despite the many improvements the company has made to those offerings. This move is enough for me to ditch Cortana on Windows 10.
At least we can still set our own default browser on Windows 10… for now.
[Via Windows Blog]
Comments
4 responses to “Microsoft Cortana Now Locked In To Bing And Edge”
I really tried to give Edge a good, solid go after I upgraded to Win10, but frankly, IE11 is better.
The number of websites straight-up broken in Edge has been appalling, and its usability is near non-existent.
And nothing extra really needs to be said about the viability of Bing as a useful engine compared to Google. Everyone already knows that.
does Siri integrate with anything other than apple back end products?
does Google now integrate with anything other than alphabet/google back end products?
I am genuinely intrigued.
Given Cortana relies on the metrics received from bing, the more accurate it is the better Cortana can respond (I assume) so using another search engine kind of defeats that learning that Cortana should be doing.
Probably not much of an excuse for the browser though but again the question would be to the first point…does Siri or Google Now allow other party’s products to integrate with their digital assistants?
Seems perfectly reasonable that it would use Bing to search. It’s a natural language search driven piece of software, you’d expect it to be designed using a particular search engine. Not using your default browser seems unnecessary though.
looks like I wont be using Cortana then
Fuck you Microsoft! I wouldn’t mind using Bing or Edge but as of now they are NOT up to par. Was really happy with pressing the windows key and searching, but now you have ruined that experience, really fucking annoying, absolute joke. Edge is fast, yes. But it sucks balls, it is broken on every second website, Bing is fucking useless and littered with ads… I am finding it harder and harder to like you guys.