Home > News

PC Manager Sneakily Makes Bing Default Search Engine After Repair

By Laura Tucker
Microsoft Pc Manager Edge Bing Featured

People talk about browser wars, PC vs. Mac, Android vs. iPhones, etc., but there’s also a fight within search engines. Microsoft’s PC Manager will restore the Bing search engine to the default on Edge, after it repairs your PC.

Microsoft’s PC Manager App

There isn’t great cause for concern, as nothing is harmed throughout this, but it is kind of sneaky, as it changes this default without asking first, when you were just looking to clean up your PC.

PC Manager isn’t loaded as a default but is an optional download. You can download it to your PC to clean up your hard drive and free up storage. It can also do you a great favor by reducing ads and pop-ups. If your PC isn’t working as it should, run PC Manager to detect issues and fix things, as well as eliminate threats. It has a variety of tools that are built in.

Microsoft Pc Manager Edge Bing Microsoft Store

Interestingly, the free app’s description on the Microsoft Store says it offers “protection of your default settings from unauthorized changes.” That sounds great and a real help.

The app was released in October 2022 and requires Windows 10 or higher. But only now has it been called out for trying to force-feed Bing to users after the app was updated with Repair Tips and File Cleanup. Tired of having Windows links open Edge and Bing? Learn how to stop it.

PC Manager Restores Bing as Default Search Engine

PC Manager is making the news this week after it was found to be changing the default settings in Edge. As a repair tip, it sends an alert that a default setting was changed while repairing your system, then asks you to reset the start page to a new tab page and the search engine to Bing, if you had selected another search engine, such as Google or Brave.

Microsoft Pc Manager Edge Bing Search Engine

The frustrating part of this is that while it does let you know it changed your search engine of choice, it’s already done by the time you learn about it. Even more frustrating is that this is not a repair tip. This is not a needed change to make your PC run more smoothly. It didn’t need to be “managed” on your PC.

Not that Microsoft is the only big name in the tech space that tries to sneak its way onto your system. Apple is particularly known for trying to keep users within its ecosystem, and Google certainly has plenty of tricks up its sleeve as well.

This is just something for you to keep in mind. PC Manager is a worthy tool for cleaning up your PC, but you just need to keep an eye on it and restore things to YOUR defaults – not necessarily the defaults that Microsoft chooses for you.

If you want more help for your PC, check out these Windows Defender features to help protect your machine. Need to clean up the Windows Registry? Try these options.

Image credit: Unsplash. All screenshots by Laura Tucker.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.