Comments on: Bing: Input Chinese, Get Censored Results

By: Hannah

Hannah — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:40:21 +0000

Actually, if you go to google.cn, google’s chinese search site, and look up “tiananmen” you’d get the same “filtered” results.

By: Nelson Wang

Nelson Wang — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:08:07 +0000

Steve, if you know how to read Chinese, you lied. Otherwise, you don’t know what you were saying. If you search “天安门” (simplified Chinese character of TianAnMen) in google, the returned results are totally different than what you saw in Bing. In google search results, most of them are about Tiananmen Square Massacre.

By: Amy

Amy — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 06:32:39 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Steve. It’s questionable to say that Chinese don’t think of the 1989 protest when they think of Tiananmen, but yeah, they’re definitely less inclined to publish content about it.

I tried the experiment again, and there are still some different results for web searches of ‘天安门‘ that I can see, with Bing showing the least ’sensitive’ content. I’m not sure what factors are at work there. But I get that, essentially, agency is with the individual, not the search engine, and bound by location.

By: Steve Macbeth

Steve Macbeth — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 01:51:07 +0000

This isn’t caused by filtering of US market results for this query. There just isn’t much content in Chinese for this query, like there is for the English version. Mostly people in western countries think of these images of tanks and protest when they think of Tiananmen Square, most Chinese people don’t.

If you do a similar experiment on Google and Yahoo you will see similar results.

Most content in most search engines in Chinese is from China and there just isn’t much content in China that related 天安门 to protests, so you don’t see that content when you search. However, most content in the west about Tiananmen is related to the protest so you do see it.