Microsoft Tackles 'Horrifying' Bing Search Results (bbc.com)

Microsoft has "taken action" to change its Bing search engine after it was found to give "horrifying" results for some terms. From a report: Journalist Chris Hoffman discovered Bing suggested racist topics when he looked up words such as "Jews", "Muslims" and "black people". Bing also ranked widely debunked conspiracy theories among the top suggestions for other words. Mr Hoffman said Microsoft had to do better at moderating its search system. In his investigation, Mr Hoffman looked up racially-themed terms and found that the majority of suggestions for further searches that accompanied results pointed people to racist sites or images. Racist memes and images were also returned for many of the words he tried. "We all know this garbage exists on the web, but Bing shouldn't be leading people to it with their search suggestions," wrote Mr Hoffman. It is believed that the suggestions for further searches connected to these terms have emerged from a combination of user activity and concerted action by far-right groups to skew responses. [...] Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, said: "We take matters of offensive content very seriously and continue to enhance our systems to identify and prevent such content from appearing as a suggested search. As soon as we become aware of an issue, we take action to address it."

Comments

Try writing better searches

[macxcool]

I'd appreciate a search engine that gives me exactly what I search for. I can filter things myself and get better at searching and get what I'm looking for that way.

I thought searches were supposed to reflect realit

[JoeyRox]

If those pages are the type people are reading most often for those given search terms then Bing is doing its job. I don't expect morality to be a weighting factor for a query (horrible as that may be).

Lack of censorship was the only...

[Anonymous Coward]

reason I sometimes use Bing. Thanks for killing the one advantage Bing had.

But is it really appropriate for MS to filter?

[presidenteloco]

I can see "deprioritize" yes.

But if it comes to full removal filtering from the complete long-list of search results, that seems like a dangerous precedent.

It may be targeting universally objectionable racist stuff now, but it is a slippery slope to make MS, Google, and Facebook the moral police.

What if they start filtering out the postings of supporters of "trade enemy" countries. as being flamebait. Or start filtering out unpopular opinions phrased with strong language. This starts to sound exactly like the great totalitarian firewall of China.

A better solution might be search-user tweakable prioritization / filter settings, with "tame" default settings.

That way, a journalist researching, or a historian documenting, racist crap on the internet could find what they're looking for.

Re: I thought searches were supposed to reflect re

[HarrySquatter]

I did a Bing search none of those things were on any of the 5 pages I scrolled. The first result was a linux.com 'Windows to Linux Mogration Guide.' So basically, your post is complete and total bullshit.

Re: Horrifying?

[gweihir]

The question here is whether it is a search engine's task to educate and censor or not. And it has no good answer. If you say no, you get all the horrible ignorance, arrogance, racism, x-ism, etc. but you also get a true picture of reality in the net. If you say yes, you get a "morality" that is dictated by those with power, which may well be worse.

Re: I thought searches were supposed to reflect re

[Calydor]

Swedish media have been caught making the decision not to report on events regarding muslim immigrants because those reports would be beneficial for the (politically) unpopular part Sverigedemokraterna. This wasn't about racist memes - it was about choosing not to report factual truth about things that actually happened because it was not politically correct to do so.

Is that what you want the internet to become? In that case, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?