Some countries get sexless Bing experience from Microsoft
The Internet may have made the world a much smaller place but it seems that where you live still has a big effect on what kind of experience you have on the Web. Take Bing for example, which is throwing up different results for different countries. In some, the whole thing is a truly sexless affair. Like most marriages.
Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine and effort to overtake Google in the online search market. It’s a beefed-up, more intelligent, more user-friendly version of Live Search and is already taking a bite out of Google’s massive market share.
Microsoft unveiled Bing recently, and one of the first things many people noticed was the very open-minded attitude to sex and porn on the site. Not only does searching for “Porn” or “Sex” return a startling number of results, although no more than Google, but the images and video clips were viewable within the search engine itself, meaning you never had to leave the site to view or watch sexually explicit material.
Obviously, this pleased some people and displeased others. But the haters should remember that’s why the ‘Safe Search’ option is there, to protect those of a sensitive disposition.
It has now emerged there’s another way of avoiding anything sexually explicit on Bing – simply change your ‘Country Location’ to one of the many Microsoft has decided needs protecting from this sort of material. While the United States, Canada, and Australia are fine, most other countries around the world are being censored to varying degrees.
Fox News reports that a dozen or so countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, China, Taiwan, India, and Germany, have the search term ‘Sex’ completely exorcised from Bing. Using the term returns no results, be it videos, photos, or even normal Web links.
Meanwhile, the U.K., France, Japan, and Russia get tweaked results to hide the more hardcore material below less potent examples of the genre. Others still, including the rest of Europe, New Zealand, and South Africa, get hardcore images but no video nasties of any kind. Which is truly bizarre.
It’s likely Microsoft is trying to stay on the right side of the local laws governing different countries around the world. Which is very noble I suppose. However, is it really Microsoft’s responsibility to censor Internet users searches? Particularly when Google doesn’t seem to do the same. It strikes me as a tad overzealous.
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