Bing Censoring All Simplified Chinese Language Queries

boggis writes "Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times journalist, is calling for a boycott of Microsoft's Bing. They have censored search requests at the request of the Chinese Government (like certain others). The difference is that Bing has censored all searches done anywhere in simplified Chinese characters (the characters used in mainland China). This means that a Chinese speaker searching for Tiananmen anywhere in the world now gets the impression that it is just a lovely place to visit."

Comments

Re:contrast

[h4rm0ny]

well if their goal was to differentiate from google, i guess "don't be evil" is a good place to stand apart.

Google also censor results in China. Search for Tiannamen Square or Falun Gong on google.cn and you find just the same whitewashed results as with Bing. The difference is merely one of implementation. Google has done it by censoring the results in their country-specific site. Bing have done it by censoring results when you search using a language form popular in mainland China. It's hard to say conclusively which is least effective. With Google you can search via one of their international sites to get around it. With Bing you can enter search terms in a different language such as English. Both are, of course, subject to the Great Firewall of China interfering when you follow results to places like Wikipedia etc. which is not the fault of either Google or Bing.

So in summary, Google innovates and Microsoft copies. Not much change there, but unfortunately they have both sold out to the Chinese government. Neither is clean.

Some quasi-scientific experiments

[phoenix321]

Assuming we have an Internet surfer searching for information about Tiananmen square.

Inputs can be "Tiananmen" or tian1an2men2 in simplified Chinese (which will not render on /. due to missing UTF8 support)

Compare the Google returns for searches
http://www.google.de/search?hl=cn&safe=off&q=tiananmen&btnG=Search
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=cn&safe=off&q=tiananmen&btnG=Search

http://images.google.de/images?hl=cn&safe=off&q=tiananmen&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=cn&safe=off&q=tiananmen&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
(note the difference in the TLD, safe search is off in all cases)

Wildly different results, the CN domain returning no image of Tank Man and the DE domain returns nothing BUT him.

Trying that again in traditional Chinese:
http://images.google.de/images?hl=en&safe=off&um=1&sa=1&q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%97%A8&btnG=Search+images&aq=f&oq=&start=0
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=en&safe=off&um=1&sa=1&q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%97%A8&btnG=Search+images&aq=f&oq=&start=0

Results almost identical, with only a slight variation in their order.

http://www.google.de/search?hl=en&safe=off&um=1&q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%97%A8&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=iw&start=0
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=en&safe=off&um=1&q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%97%A8&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=iw&start=0

Results again wildly different. Both searches now return Chinese content, but the DE domain prominently features a YouTube link to our good old friend Tank Man, while the CN domain prominently features a city map and Baidu links, which are guaranteed to not contain something about Tank Man, I can assure you.

This get's more pronounced if we search for Tiananmen in Chinese AND the year number 1989, which simply must return some content about the protests if the search engine itself is any good.

http://images.google.de/images?hl=en&safe=off&q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%97%A8%201989&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=en&safe=off&q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%97%A8%201989&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

Same result: both searches return pages entirely in Chinese, but the DE domain return a Chinese photo of the protests first and the CN domain returning only photos of The Party Leaders and happy soldiers.

Let's compare the results with other TLDs
Russia:

Re:Some quasi-scientific experiments

[sdiz]

IThe footer of google.cn reads "According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown." (google translation)