This Isn't the First Time Microsoft's Been Accused of Bing Censorship

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."

Comments

Bing?

[niff]

Does anyone actually use it?

Bing?

[msobkow]

Why would anyone use Bing in the first place? It's results are very poor and scattered compared to Google, even on technical term searches that it should be able to do much better at.

Google stays ahead of the pack because they do a good job of search, not just because they're the most familiar name. Until Bing and others can do at least as well, I'll keep drinking the kool-aid.