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Microsoft's Bing Refuses Search Term "Sex" In India
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently Microsoft is censoring search results for Bing in India and other countries. If you try to search for the term 'sex,' along with lots of variations, from India using Microsoft's new search engine, an error message is returned that says, 'the search sex may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms.' There's no preference setting or toggle-on-or-off choice; you simply cannot search for the term 'sex' in India if you are using Bing. While a user still can change their country and try the non-Indian version of Bing, this seems like an unnecessary step and unnecessary censorship on the part of Microsoft. Apparently Google has no problem with Indians searching for the term 'sex.'"
... there is no sex in India's champagne room.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
there was pron.
Big Brother knows what's best for us. Now, sit down, shut up, and consume consume consume, work work work, buy buy buy.
A search for "sex" would return sexually explicit content? Duh. If you wanted to search for something that wasn't explicit, you wouldn't plug in the term "sex", would you?
Note: I was 13 when I wrote most of this. Take with several grains of salt.
used to say that gay people were not "a problem" in India, since no one there was really gay. But it was OK for men to hold hands in public.
Perhaps Microsoft doesn't want it's tech support searching for certain things while on the job?
Enjoy! -Excalibur
No shit, Sherlock.
Keep digging Watson.
If their population, and the Kama Sutra, are any indication, the cat is definitely out of the bag! Why Microsoft would choose to limit this information is beyond me...
Google blocks searches for "Freedom" "Liberty" and other similar terms in China.
You Google fanboys really need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid(TM), Google is no better than Microsoft.
It does stop you form searching for sex. Guess what, goatse gives the same result too! However you can search for:
allah is gay
gay
nigger
make bombs
bombing building
bme pain olympics
2 girls 1 cup
Congratulations, Microsoft. You have just blocked one of the most popular topics on the internet, forcing people to use an other search engine. Google will love this decision ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
Huh? They have names?
The Indian government might have demanded it.. stranger things have happened.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_India
Pornography is illegal in India. I assume the reason Microsoft bans the word "Sex" is ensure it is not sued as a pornography distributor.
Name of their first pet and name of the street where they live.
I'm Brownie de Lappe.
They must be related, usually their last name is "jpg".
Circumcision is child abuse.
Does "zzzz" get you sex?
Microsoft Spell Check Easter Eggs.
Your argument kinda melted down into vitriol a little at the end there. Easily done when the topic is MS I know!
However, fair points. Corporations care nothing for "good" or "right" - nor do they specifically go out of the way to be "evil". Corporate decision making is based primarily on the profit motive - other considerations are secondary. The decisions that result are ultimately amoral, not necessarily immoral.
Truth is something that a corporation will employ in its statements and publications only so long as there is an estimable return in doing so.
Where we can get away with saying, "Our product is definitely better than all our competitors' products" and the estimable cost of fines, consumer backlash or other bureaucratic costs that might result from blazon lying are significantly less than the estimable profit from gullible rubes buying our product because they thought we must be telling the truth... then we make that statement.
It's not that we the corporation specifically /intend/ harm to consumers. It's simply that we don't ultimately care one way or the other so long as the profit trend from consumer spending on our products is upwards.
There's how many people in India? Over a billion? Maybe it should just redirect to "Did you mean to search for Birth Control?"
There's an entire list of countries where the search returns that message, including germany:
China
Hong Kong
Indonesia
Malaysia
Thailand
Turkey
And a lot of middle-east places, actually.
A lots of those I can see how this could make some warped sense for religious/political reasons, but can someone clarify why Germany? What makes it special?
From google trends searching for Sex:
Yeah I'd say google has absolutely no problem with people in India searching for "sex".
RTFM. With the emphasis on the F.
A lot of Indian's seem to be posting here, sooo.... any single Indian females by any chance? :)
(Yup, I'm gonna be modded down to hell, I just know it, but you can't blame a guy for trying !)
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
its not like its a highly overpopulated, poor country, right?
better to keep indians ignorant of sex, in case they were to learn it might not be a good idea to bring yet another mouth to feed into the world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If they don't like explicit content, then should filter the content, not the searches. I think it is possible to return informative web pages about sex.
I did a search for:
se x
And got all the results for 'sex'
When in certain countries, you can't turn off the SS feature.
Hmmmm.... Jingles 121st.
Doesn't really have a good ring to it.
Are you sure about that?
OMG! I never noticed that before - BING is a recursive acronym. Meaning Bing Is Not Google.
Yet another example of MS following the GNU project ;-)
My pics.