Cortana can no longer work with Google or other 3rd parties

May 3, 2016 08:09 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft’s betting big on Cortana to boost Windows 10 and Bing adoption, as the search engine is the service powering the digital assistant, and the company has decided to come down to quite a radical decision to protect this integration.

The company has announced that, from now on, Cortana can only be used with Bing and Microsoft Edge browser, so other search engines can no longer be used for the personal assistant.

Tricks that have made it to the web lately allowed users to replace Bing with Google as the underlying search engine of Cortana, thus making it possible for this feature to work with third-party services as well.

Want Cortana? You must stick with Bing then

But in a recent post, Microsoft explains that Cortana was designed from the very beginning to work with Bing and in an announcement called “protecting the integrating search experience in Windows 10,” the company reveals that third-party search engines are banned from connecting to the personal assistant.

“Unfortunately, as Windows 10 has grown in adoption and usage, we have seen some software programs circumvent the design of Windows 10 and redirect you to search providers that were not designed to work with Cortana,” Microsoft explains.

Redmond says that using Google as the search engine for Cortana leads to “compromised experience that is less reliable and predictable,” and emphasizes that those who want to use the personal assistant must use Bing and Edge browser too. This is “the only way we can confidently deliver this personalized, end-to-end search experience,” the company explains.

Microsoft Edge thus becomes the only browser that is launched when opening links from Cortana, and no, there’s no way you can change that.

On the other hand, if you really don’t want to use Bing, you’re still allowed to install any other third-party browser and use any search engine in Windows 10, but if Cortana is what you’re interested in, then you must stick with Microsoft’s defaults.