14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft responded to allegations that its search/decision engine was delivering sanitized result to sensitive queries related to China in order to keep in line with the country’s communist dictatorship. Adam Sohn, Bing senior director, disputed accusations that the Bing search engine had been turned into a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist party because of the way the search engine deals with politically sensitive searches in simplified Chinese. He argued that returning filtered results in perfect concerts with the Chinese communist authorities’ false perspective of reality was the result of bugs and of the way that the Bing search algorithm performs.
Bing is instead “committed to comprehensive results” Microsoft notes in a blog post published at the end of the past week. “We did fix a bug in web search that addressed this issue. There are some queries that provide very balanced web results, for example 六四 天安门 (June 4th Tiananmen). We recognize that we can continue to improve our relevancy and comprehensiveness in these web results and we will,” Sohn explained.
However, the company did point out that the Bing image search was faulty when it handled queries in simplified Chinese. “In addition, today’s investigations uncovered the fact that our image search is not functioning properly for queries entered using Simplified Chinese characters outside of the PRC. We have identified the bug and are at work on the fix. We expect to have this done before the Thanksgiving holiday,” Sohn explained.
The fact of the matter is that all global companies have had to compromise their policies in order to be permitted access to the Chinese market. Google and Yahoo are additional search engines that also censor results related to searches involving Tiananmen, Dalai Lama, and Falun Gong. Instead of offering Chinese users relevant information, search engines offer instead a “red” soup of propagandistic results cooked by the country’s communist party. But alas, not Google, nor Yahoo and not even Microsoft can ignore China, and risk being cut off from the world’s largest Internet market.
“Bing’s intent for these types of queries is to provide relevant and comprehensive results for our customers,” Sohn added. “Community feedback and input is incredibly important to Bing – it helps us do better and sometimes alerts us to things we can take immediate action to fix as we continue to improve.”