How Bing skews its Chinese search results

Microsoft copped a huge spray from NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff a few days ago for their selective treatment censorship of Bing search results.

Kristoff said:

If Microsoft felt it had to bow to Chinese censorship within China’s borders, based on the IP address, that might be defensible. But when Microsoft skews its worldwide searches to make Hu Jintao feel better, that’s a disgrace. It becomes simply a unit of the Central Committee Propaganda Department.

What has prompted Kristof’s ire is that Microsoft is providing different (read: pro-Beijing) results for searches in simplified Chinese characters compard with traditional Chinese or English.

My own brief test mostly bore this out.

Results for searches on “Tiananmen 6/4” and “Taiwan independence” are certainly bowdlerized; the simplified search results go straight to mainland sites. Non-communist views on both topics disappeared completely.

Admittedly a search on “Dalai Lama” yielded similar results in both complex and simplified versions, but I've seen enough. As Kristoff says, it's absurd for Microsoft to claim that its simplified Chinese searches “produce pro-Communist results because of the algorithms used.”

Another reason to not use Bing.