04 Feb How to Stop Microsoft Office changing Your Search Engine to Bing
Overview
On many occasions Microsoft have tried to get us to use their own search engine “Bing” rather than other engines such as google. This has had limited success (like Bing results), but Microsoft are now upping the ante and starting to apply devious ways to push us to Bing.
The team at Microsoft are now looking to force users to using Bing by simply setting the search engine to default in a much deeper way. To do this, they are using Office 365 which will soon change your preferred browser/homepage to that of its own search engine “Bing” and back again if you don’t change things under the bonnet.
The plan is to deploy this change through a Microsoft update in mid-February. Microsoft say this change is needed to allow our searches to ‘access relevant workplace information, directly from the browser address bar’ and as a result the Bing search, will be added to all new office 365 proplus accounts as soon as the update is released for it.
You will still be able to change to your search engine of choice, but this is going to require additional steps to prevent the Microsoft plugin changing things back to Bing. Below are the steps you can take to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Prevent installation of the Bing extension yourself
- First you will need to download the Microsoft group policy templates.
- Once you have installed these, you will need to open the group policy editor in the start menu or in your search at the bottom right of your screen.
- In the editor, navigate too Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office 2016 (Machine)\Updates.
- After doing this look through what policies are displayed and double click on Don’t install extension for Microsoft search in Bing that makes Bing the default the search engine option. (ironically it says that)
- You can now select the Enabled option and then Apply it in order to prevent Microsoft setting Bing as your default option and you should be good to go.
Whilst this may seem long-winded if you love to google being your search engine of choice then the effort will be worth it. These little tricks and tips may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things but having poor search results delivered can make a fun day miserable.