Microsoft Testing Clear Distinction Between Free & Paid Search Results On Bing

Microsoft’s disclosure of search ads on Bing has not been the greatest, honestly, in many cases, worse than Google’s disclosures. Recently, however, Bing has been testing a clearer distinction between its ads and organic free listings.

Frank Sandtmann spotted this and posted about it on Mastodon and after fiddling with it enough, I was able to replicate it.

Look at how the ads are in the white background and the free organic listings are in the gray background:

I wonder if this will go live or after Microsoft sees the results, they will go back to making the distinction between ads and free results almost impossible to see.

Frank posted more examples on Mastodon.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.