While Google defaults to a plain page, Microsoft's Bing search engine displays a large background image.

Many people might enjoy this background image, and Microsoft claims that its loading does not slow down searching as they have "engineered the page to load in stages". However, if you would rather search from a less cluttered page, do the following:

Via Microsoft's Help Pages:

If you access this Microsoft help page you will see a link at the bottom labeled "Give me the plain background". Click this link and the background image goes away.

If you later want the image, come back to that help page and click the link "Show me the daily images".

Direct access:

Turn off background image display:

http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

Turn background image display back on:

http://www.bing.com/?rb=1

Note:

If you use either of these methods, a cookie is set on your system so that if you later access Bing's main page, the image (or lack thereof) preference should be in effect. Note that if your web browser, firewall, or other security software is set to delete cookies, your preference will not be remembered.

Technical note: Cookie name _UR from .bing.com seems to contain this information, including ?rb= in its data.

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Return to the Bing Search Engine page.