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TonyRedmond's avatar
Dec 23, 2024

Microsoft Search in Bing Gets the Bullet

On 19 December 2024, Microsoft announced the retirement of the Microsoft Search in Bing feature. Copilot is better at searching and presenting web and work results. Although tenant administrators might worry about the recent batch of retirements, the fact is that Microsoft retires unsuccessful products and features from Microsoft 365 all the time. The swift demise of the Office tags feature is another example.

https://office365itpros.com/2024/12/23/microsoft-search-in-bing-retires/

  • Anthony-123's avatar
    Anthony-123
    Iron Contributor

    I don't know how people who have worked with Microsoft products for their careers have learned to cope with the corporation. They are constantly breaking things that are good/great/useful and replacing them with mediocre-to-horrid solutions, if they're replaced at all. It feels like every week, sometimes every day, something I heavily rely upon is broken or deprecated.   

    My job is to use the tools Microsoft provides to help our business run more efficiently. Sometimes I find or invest weeks to build a great solution, write up a user guide for our staff, then ensure everyone is following the new "path of excellence". Inevitably though, Microsoft foobars that solution causing me to invest double to triple the amount of time to pick up the pieces and (hopefully) build a replacement. More often, there is no replacement so the product or efficiency our organization relied on just goes away (ex. Wiki).   

    All that is to say - I wish Microsoft would stop increasing my workload. I have projects that are literally backed up over a year because I have to keep repairing what they keep breaking. 

    It may seem like a little thing, but I now have to rewrite all my user guides that suggest to our staff that they use Edge and Bing for work because of the superior search tools. For years, I have had the joy of introducing people to bing.com/work to instantly find literally anything among hundreds of thousands of files on our SharePoint sites. I have dozens of links saved across our SharePoint sites utilizing this prefixed URL that I now have to spend weeks resolving. I now have to take back all the lessons I've taught people (especially older people) to use "this one simple trick".  

    It's not a huge issue. But it's another issue. Another issue Microsoft has added to my plate that I have to deal with on top of my already stacked backlog of the actual work I'm supposed to be doing. So, when my boss asks why a two-month project isn't done three months later, I can point to all the issues and the trickle-down impact caused by these choices Microsoft is making FOR. NOOOO. GOOD. REASON.  

    For what possible reason is Microsoft choosing to deprecate another perfectly fine and useful tool - YET AGAIN? 

    This announcement reads as Microsoft instructing its users, "DO NOT USE BING.COM", instead, edit your browser preferences to search using office.com/search/?q= 

    What product manager thought it was a good idea to drive users away from their search engine? 

  • arnel_gp's avatar
    arnel_gp
    Steel Contributor

    I hate co-pilot, it only shows me results Copilot want to show.

    I love Google better.

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