Microsoft Doesn’t Think People In India Should Be Allowed to Search for the Term Sex

Thanks to sandelion for pointing out an interesting fact to me about Microsoft’s new search engine bing. I blogged about bing earlier this week and have been using it as my default search engine instead of Google all week. Apparently Microsoft has decided that part of their job with the new search engine is to become the world’s new censor.

At first I couldn’t believe this. Why would Microsoft think limiting the information provided in a search engine to be a good thing? But then I tried it myself. You can try it too. Just change your location preference in bing from the U.S. to India and try searching for the term “sex.” Yes, Microsoft has decided in their infinite wisdom that Indians should not be allowed to search for information about sex. In Microsoft’s words, “The search sex may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms.” That’s right, there’s no, “okay, I’m a big boy, go ahead and show me my results” button next to this Microsoft error message, there is simply a message telling you to change your search term. It’s like an instant trip back to the Victorian age.

Now in fairness, it seems that people in India could always just change their country preference from India to the U.S. to get these search results, but it’s still super lame that Microsoft would deem it necessary for people to have to change their country preferences to look up something as universal as “sex.” And many people of course won’t think to do this.

Google, by the way, has no problem with people searching for the term “sex” in India. I guess that’s all part of that whole “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful” thing that they seem to be after. Since bing supposedly stands for “bing is not google,” maybe Microsoft should adopt their own mission statement for bing. It could be “censoring the world’s information and making it inaccessible and useless.”

This sort of censorship is a really stupid decision on Microsoft’s part. It’s the biggest reason yet I’ve heard for why I won’t use bing anymore. Censorship sucks Microsoft, don’t you know that yet?

Did I mention this has "FAIL" written all over it?

Trying to block well over a third of the world's population from searching for porn on the internet probably isn't a good first step in dominating the search engine business.

I guess Mr. Ballmer hasn't seen this:

Is there a good reason why anyone should be arsed using Microsoft for web searches?

I can see it being set as the default home page for IE8 when it is fully released.

Trying to block well over a third of the world's population from searching for porn on the internet probably isn't a good first step in dominating the search engine business.

Nevermind the fact that such policies of self-inflicted censorship have "FAIL" written all over them... I still can't get my head around the fact that - even though Microsoft has always been known for being bent around world domination - they would still have the cajones to go up against Google of all things!

Did I mention this has "FAIL" written all over it?

response from microsoft: http://in.reuters.com/article/paidmediaAtoms/idIN196193078720090604

A Microsoft spokesperson said Bing returns sexually explicit results only when a user turns off safe search. “By default, Bing filters out explicit image and video results. Consumers must take action to turn off the Safe Search filter in their settings in order for explicit image or video content to appear in Bing’s results.”