This Isn't the First Time Microsoft's Been Accused of Bing Censorship 56
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft has censored Chinese-language results for Bing users in the United States as well as mainland China, according to an article in The Guardian. But this isn't the first time that Bing's run into significant controversy over the 'sanitizing' of Chinese-language search results outside of mainland China. In November 2009, Microsoft came under fire from free-speech advocates after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof accused the company of 'craven kowtowing' to the mainland Chinese government by sanitizing its Chinese-language search results for users around the world. Just as with The Guardian and other news outlets this week, Microsoft insisted at the time that a 'bug' was to blame for the sanitized search results. 'The bug identified in the web image search was indeed fixed,' a Microsoft spokesperson told me in December 2009, after I presented them with a series of screenshots suggesting that the pro-Chinese-government filter remained in effect even after Kristof's column. 'Please also note that Microsoft 'recognize[s] that we can continue to improve our relevancy and comprehensiveness in these web results and we will.' Time will tell whether anything's different this time around."
Bing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone actually use it?
Easy decision (Score:0, Insightful)
It's an easy decision really, don't use BING.
Re:Bing? (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I'd like to see MS die a slow painful corporate death due to its past greedy manipulation of "standards", we don't want a search monopoly either (in Google).
I hate to say it, but I hope Bing stays alive in some form.
And Google doesn't censor? Right. (Score:2, Insightful)
Google's and Bing's image search return completely different photos with "safe search" disabled. Of course, Google's explanation is that you have to explicitly search using pornographic terms if you want porn to be included in the results. IMHO, their image search censorship makes their results broken, since they do not accurately depict the content of the Internet (which we all know, is for porn [youtube.com]).
Sure, it sounds like I'm a troll spouting a line of scroogled pro-Microsoft BS, but I honestly just feel it's a sad state of affairs for online freedom when Microsoft is the company with the balls to let people search for fapping material and Apple actually sees something wrong with letting a mobile app developer have access to every piece of personal information on your phone.