On Bing:

Hamburger menu > Customize my homepage > uncheck the 3 boxes

Same clutter as google.

Yes, you can complain about the default, but Bing makes this pretty darn easy.

Without tracking you (no saved cookies at browser restart)?

One has cute penguins in the background, both show a pop up dialog trying to get me to do something.

The layout of the results page for two sample search are almost identical.

Actually for "what is a barnacle" I think Bing wins for clarity of results.

When searching for "what dog food is the best", both Bing and Google give me an entire page full of ads before any actual results pop up.

On desktop, Google's "sponsored" marker is more obvious than Bing's, but no wheres near as obvious as it used to be when Google's motto was don't be evil.

Mobile search result ads are aggressively bad with Google, frequently I have to scroll down past a page and a half of ads before I get to actual results.

All in all, users are losing out.

They look pretty similar to me except that Bing has a giant photo of penguins. Maybe you have a different experience?

e: Oh woah if I zoom out to 90% then I see what you are talking about.

The difference is entirely understandable if you look at a MSN.com page from the early 2000s: it's a search bar with links web stories around it. Bing was created primarily keep that old audience from defecting to Google.

What worked for Google in a crowded search market in the year 2000 is not necessarily going to work for Microsoft Bing in 2023.

In any case, if Google's clean design was such a differentiator, they wouldn't need to pay Apple $15bn to make it the default search engine on Safari.

What's funny about bing is that it shows me what appears to be, from UI cues, a carousel of some sort but none of the controls do anything. (It went away after a refresh)

Also crazy that they wont let me use their new AI without downloading Edge. I'm not going to change my browser just to try a search feature. Do you want to get me using your service or not? Presumably my using Edge + Bing is only a minor improvement in conversion versus me using Chrome + Bing, relative to me not using Bing at all.

If you're talking about what I think you are, I was just noticing the same bug earlier today. It seems to be fixed now, at least on my browser. In any event the carousel control arrows are supposed to be on the vertical edges of the frame. If they disappear, you can click, hold, and do a slight drag motion on the image, and the carousel controls will reappear.