Microsoft has slipped Bing search into Android through Outlook, and we feel cheated

If you are using Outlook for your phone’s email and calendars, on Android, you might have seen a notification for Microsoft’s search engine Bing. 

Many Android users have spotted that Outlook has started slipping in a ‘Bing search’ option in the long-press menu that you get to see when you select text.

If you tap on this it opens your default browser with a Bing query for the words you had just selected. Sure, it is helpful, but Bing is really not a search engine you have been thinking of in a world dominated by Google.

The menu option does not appear for everyone and many users have reported that they have managed to get rid of this feature by uninstalling outlook. And if you reinstall the app, it might now even turn up for you again. Also, it does not appear when you install other Microsoft apps except Bing.

This is not the first time Microsoft has done this though, it has slipped in suggestions for its own apps on Android’s share menu in 2019.

Microsoft is tapping into built-in Android functionality to add the Bing search option, but it is not ‘compromising’ your device if you were unsure. However, this might not find many fans. Let’s face it, you were not expecting to see Bing on any of our devices and we don’t really want it, no matter what the form.

Microsoft has an incentive when it experiments with features like these. Bing has under 2.8% of search engine usage share as of June 2020 and while that is more than competition it absolutely falls off the charts when it gets compared to Google that has 91.75% share.

If Microsoft has any plans to catch up to Google, suggesting Bing searches might help is close the gap but we are not very sure how many people will be happy to deal with this. We surely don’t want to.