Forum Discussion

Tom_Geldner's avatar
Tom_Geldner
Copper Contributor
Feb 20, 2024

Major annoyance - BING converts search links to BING.COM redirect links.

I don't know if there's any way around this but BING converts every search result URL into a BING.COM redirect URL. While this may seem like a good idea to Microsoft since it records click-throughs, it falls apart on direct linked documents such as PDF, images, etc. The redirect prevents you from actually copying the real link and pasting it elsewhere. For example, something as simple as xyz.com/mydoc.pdf turns into bing.com/search=?q=blahblahblahblah and on for 50+ more random characters. And you can't simply click on the link and get it from the address bar because Edge will open the document in whatever external program handles that document type (like Acrobat Reader or MS Excel). 

 

I do a fair amount of online research and this behavior is really annoying when I want to capture and reference a link directly to a document.

 

Note that Google does NOT do this as it preserves the actual destination link in the search results. And some of the other search engines I've tried (eg Freespoke, DuckDuckGo) don't do it either.

  • Hi Tom,

    This bugs me too so I use the second line with the direct text. For feedback directly to the team, hit the feedback button in the search UI and highlight the issue directly so they can reproduce it.

    Sincerely,
    IoTGirl
    Microsoft Maps Team Member

Resources