Chinese-language Bing searches in the USA censored to match mainland Chinese results

boing
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“Microsoft will not comment on the matter.”

Um, Bullshit Cory. MS commented long before you posted this on BB.

From winsupersite:

“Bing does not apply China’s legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China,” Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz notes in a prepared statement. “Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results-removal notification for some searches noted in the report, but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China.”

As the writer of the article says: “Never let an utter lack of evidence get in the way of a good story!”

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Cory, please try to maintain civility in these discussions: Here in the free world, when we decide to implement the most restrictive regulations we could find in any country on all countries we prefer to use the word ‘harmonize’.

“Chinese-language Bing Search Results in the USA Harmonized with Mainland Chinese Results.”

See? All better. Now, how about some copyright-extension treaties?

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I get the distinct feeling that it may have just been lazy programming, if(input language == Chinese){apply China censorship}.

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“Google’s Chinese-language competitor displays much more parity between the Chinese and English editions – the Chinese Google results for controversial subjects include Chinese articles from the BBC and Wikipedia.”

I believe you misspoke/miswrote. It should be

“Google, Microsoft’s Chinese-language competitor
”

Otherwise, your sentence as is negates the entire premise of the article.

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It happens - this is BoingBoing after all.

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Slow down, Sparky. From the article that you failed to link:

"Bing does not apply China's legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China," Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz notes in a prepared statement. "Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results-removal notification for some searches noted in the report, but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China."
So it's an error that they've corrected? They've not corrected? Is it an error at all? Why give the jargon without an appreciable explanation of what that thing is? The article continues:
As for FreeWeibo, that site's home page had been flagged for "inappropriate due to low quality or adult content" for quite some time. "Bing aims to provide a robust set of high-quality, relevant search results to our users," Weitz explains. "In doing so, Bing has extremely high standards that respect human rights, privacy, and freedom of expression . . . After review, we have determined that the [FreeWeibo home] page is acceptable for inclusion in global search results."
So, Microsoft apologist website calls out FreeWiebo for being porno-flagged, then MS spokesperson says the site is okay to include in search results. I'm somewhat confused by this--are we slandering FW or are we not-slandering the site? One other thing--as part of the Bing spokesman's prepared statement, he notes:
"As part of our commitment to GNI, Microsoft follows a strict set of internal procedures for how we respond to specific demands from governments requiring us to block access to content. We apply these principles carefully and thoughtfully to our Bing version for the People's Republic of China."
But we're not talking about the Bing version for the PRC, we're talking the Bing version for outside-the-PRC. Probably just a misstatement, but that doesn't read exactly right to me. Lastly, my favorite part of the winsupersite (because win is super, amirite) other than its being clearly slanted in favor of Microsoft, was a user comment defending Bing against the Don't Be Evil folks down south:
Absolute rubbish, Bing is far superior to Google, especially when searching porn images and videos.
Well said, sir/ma'am.
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also if you do the test it mentioned in the article you can see that MS is full of it, it still censors even from the US.

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Bing? Is that like Altavista?

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“Microsoft will not comment on the matter.”

Um, Bullshit

Chill out. There’s a lot of delay because Microsoft’s Stefan Weitz decided to send out a response directly to individual journalists instead of just putting up a public statement on their website.

As the writer of the article says: “Never let an utter lack of evidence get in the way of a good story!”

Also, please educate yourself while you’re at it:

via: New Research Claims Bing Is Censoring China Search Results Globally

"In response to Microsoft’s statement, GreatFire insists it made no error in its research and says that “Microsoft has failed to address our point on the censorship policy for international Bing in China.” It also called for Microsoft to release a transparency report for Bing, worldwide, and urged Microsoft to “do the right thing and stand up to Chinese censorship.”

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It happens - this is BoingBoing after all.

And, if it didn’t happen, pedants would implode on themselves and suck a few dictionaries on their way into the black hole.

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I’m confused. The very image used on this post shows a link to Wikipedia which is the same as the top link I get on a search on Google. And of course â€œèŸŸè”–ć–‡ć˜›â€ won’t link to the Dalai Lama’s page. The Dalai Lama’s page is not in Chinese. Do the search on Google and you also won’t get his page either.

I also don’t get these links to the BBC on Google that this article talks about.

I feel like maybe people don’t understand how search engines work. A Chinese search will get biased towards places where the Chinese written language is used the most link to. Since that’s China, is there a doubt as to why sources like Baike rise to the top?

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It can also be read as, “Google’s Chinese-language competitor [to Bing] displays much more parity”

Google (the search engine) is to Google (the company) as Bing is to Microsoft.

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As of 7:45 EST, I just checked, and the English bing results for Freeweibo have it on the first page, and it is not on the first three pages of the Chinese Bing results (I stopped looking after three). The relevant site is the first hit for a Chinese Google search. Also, Chinese bing searches for ćˆ˜æ™“æłą (Liu Xiaobo) still turn up mostly CCP propaganda sites, while English Bing searches and Google searches in both languages do not. In other words, despite Microsoft’s claims, they haven’t fixed any of this stuff yet. Maybe you should think about what it says about you that you are perfectly happy to instantly believe a corporate press release over journalists, especially when it’s something you could trivially check for yourself if you had any doubts


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I queued up the post at 7AM France time.

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Kinda off topic, but fun none the less. I registered one of the new shabaka gtld DNS names.

I’ve been testing out things to see how horrendously broken support for IDN ( internationalized domain names ) are in different places.

So shabaka is an arabic gTLD. Now IDN is used fairly heavily in places where folks need to see script like shifa that aren’t supported at all in the ascii / latin char sets.

Now
 the most interesting failure I have seen is this: http://imgur.com/gallery/B8O2NdG

Google’s GMail can’t even reply to a user coming from an arabic domain. At all. It barfs on the punycode.

So
 question to ask yourself
 why is the NSA trying to grab emails from a service that can’t even communicate correctly with arabic DNS targets? Terrorism? Could be domestic, or irish, maybe november 17 isn’t as dead as we thought. Got me.

Just thought I’d share. =P

Terrify friends and family with this URL : http://☹.ïș‡ïșźï»«ïșŽïș‘.ïș¶ïș’ï»›ïș“

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Yeah, ‘glitch’. We’ll see in a couple days if the searches are on parity with Google’s.

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No, I’m pretty sure it’s more like AskJeeves. Or was it dogpile?

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Bing. Lol.

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All else aside, the words and the meanings, this admission is the gateway to hell.

How can you (1) ever rely on Bing to be of basic use, (2) ever trust Bing again, (3) not question how Bing did this, (4) not wonder whether they’ve been honeying nasty despots?

There’s so much PR fluff in here, so much corporate care over words - so much meaningless guff (“We apply these principles carefully and thoughtfully to our Bing version for the People’s Republic of China.” - that basically means nothing), so much high-falutin’ waffle (“In doing so, Bing has extremely high standards that respect human rights, privacy, and freedom of expression”) that is full or empty depending on your predispositions.

Bing! You’ve been naughty.

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