Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/23/china-bans-bing.html
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High Fives at Microsoft because China cares about Bing!
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I misread the headline thought this was another article about the detainment of Fan BingBing
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[Edit]The following predate Bing being blocked in China [Edit].
A Thomas The Tank Engine meme mashup with a clip from Trump’s 2015 Lincoln Day speech, Published to Youtube May 2016.
“Bing China” based off of a/an Ice Cube’s Check Yo Self Remix,
and that song prominently uses a sample from Grandmaster Flash’s The Message. published to Youtube May 2015.
I want to see meaning in the convergence of these two things, and then I wish it was all a dream. Was it portentous? Did China ban Bing because the media started to trend or they feared it would trend? Coincidence? It it…
a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’¹?
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That was kinda my thought too: “Wait, people actually use bing?”
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For things I search, Bing is at least as good as Google, sometimes better. And I get $5 from them each year, which at my income level is meaningful.
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Breaking news: Apparently some people use Bing
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I’m honestly curious what the spat is about. Microsoft isn’t exactly the nose-thumbing cypherpunk sort; and Bing had been available in China, so they hadn’t made the decision that the market was a writeoff. That strongly suggests that they didn’t intentionally tweak local sensitivities.
Another definitely-not-petulant-response to the Huwawei CFO extradition issue and Microsoft was a high profile option?
Sudden shift in what was sensitive today that Microsoft wasn’t quick enough on the draw on?
Just one of the periodic security-mercantalist ‘crater the foreign UX occasionally to encourage domestic competitors’ episodes?
It’s honestly a trifle puzzling. This particular story template happens all the time; but ‘Bing’ is not usually the affected party.
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I used to work for Bing and what I heard from people a lot (secondhand, sure) is that the Chinese gov’t is basically impossible to deal with. They’ll turn off access to your site randomly, and you need to basically work through specific people, and they’ll never ever admit they turned off your site. So the whole conversation has to occur in a weird third person discussion about how you noticed that some people might find that your site is offline. This would apparently happen randomly, and happened at least once while I was there. (I wasn’t involved with the fix itself, so no details there.)
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Mostly Microsoft employees/sycophants
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From my short time there they pretty much only use it for internal search or for finding Microsoft solutions.
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Exactly. It is best for finding (say) C# samples or MS product info.
Then there is the typical fanbois/corporate loyalists.
Personally, if I am finding Google does not cut it and I need not necessarily more accurate results, but quite different results, I will use Duck Duck Go.
Bing’s major sin to me is being too similar in search results while being less minimalist.
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In my world, Bing is something that happens accidentally when Firefox updates itself, and I have to go in and reset my homepage to Google. Then I forget it exists for 6-8 months.
I probably need to get out more…
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I have one fortune from a cookie stuck on my whiteboard at work. I don’t remember what the fortune says, but on the back side of it it’s titled ‘Learn Chinese’ where they print a Chinese word with an Anglicized pronunciation, then the meaning in English.
The word is pronounced “bing”, and the meaning is “disease”.
Now, I don’t know a word of Chinese; for all I know the definition on the back is every bit as accurate as the fortune on its face. Regardless, it’s hilarious.
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There’s only room for one Bing in my life.
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I lol’ed irl. Thank you for that.
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Go to Yahoo, search something, scroll to the bottom and you see Powered by Bing™
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Nice cover but I still like the original from Ross Bagdasarian (AKA David Seville) who gave us The Chipmunks.
That said I am going to be in a Cartoons rabbit hole tomorrow morning.
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