14 DAY TRIAL // Windows and Office are without a doubt two of the most pirated software products out there, and while you’d expect Microsoft to be very committed to stopping this, a recent blunder seems to suggest otherwise.
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine that the software giant has deeply integrated into a series of other products, including Windows, makes it substantially easier for users to learn how to crack Office 2019.
Because when searching for “office 2019 download,” the highlighted search result points to a website hosting the full instructions on how to get Microsoft’s latest Office productivity suite and activate it without having a genuine license.
Furthermore, the instructions are detailed in a Bing search engine result card, so you can read most of them without actually going to the shady website.
Search recommendation already removed?
While it’s clearly unexpected for Microsoft to highlight such a result when searching for common keywords like “office 2019 download,” it’s all just a mistake that’s related to how websites are automatically indexed and displayed on the search engine results page.
At the time of writing this article, searching of the same keywords no longer display the instructions to crack Office 2019, but there are reports indicating that the search results card pointed users to a torrent download page to get a pirated version of the productivity suite.
The Bing recommendation was originally discovered by security researcher Jeroen Frijters and reported on Twitter.
Given Bing no longer returns the said instructions, Microsoft has most likely pulled the website manually from the search engine results page. No official statement on this was released.
If anyone wants to see the glass half full, it’s probably a good thing that Microsoft’s Bing doesn’t have the market share of Google. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure many more users would have come across the highlighted instructions to crack Office 2019.