Search News from Limbo

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Bing clung to pro-red search
despite Kristof's 2009 warning

Rebecca MacKinnon, commenting in the Guardian, writes that she found that searches in basic Chinese characters returned results conforming to Chinese government censorship, while results in traditional Chinese writing did not do so. She suspected that Microsoft engineers had neglected to correct the search algorithm for people outside mainland China, but was at a loss to explain why Microsoft had taken no action following a disclosure in 2009 by Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist.

Mackinnon comment
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/14/micorsoft-bing-china-censorship-transparency

Kristof blog
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/boycott-microsoft-bing/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

However, there is also the matter of Bing, which is owned by Microsoft, removing the FreeWeibo.com home page from its search engine and only restoring it after the censorship story exploded this week. FreeWeibo is deemed an enemy of the Red Chinese state.

Stefan Weitz, Bing's chief, blamed technical glitches and the possibility that Weibo's web site had been deemed "inappropriate" or said to have adult content.

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