It would seem that those who search topics which are considered controversial in China using Chinese in America get vastly different results than for those in English when using Microsoft's Bing search engine.
Further searches showed different results in English and Chinese if you were looking for information on Bo Xilai the former Chinese Communist party official who was convicted of corruption and is now serving a life sentence in prison. Any inquiry will turn-up a link to Chinese government site, then his Wikipedia page but no results will appear showing western news articles about him and his crimes.
It's so nice to see Microsoft adding the Chinese government in their efforts to keep its citizenry in the dark by censoring their search results while living in the United States.
Searches first conducted by anti-censorship campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, found that Bing returns radically different results in the US for English and Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms.
These include Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989), Falun Gong and FreeGate, a popular internet workaround for government censorship.
A Chinese language search for the Dalai Lama (达赖喇嘛) on Bing is lead by a link to information on a documentary compiled by CCTV, China’s state-owned broadcaster. This is followed by two entries from Baidu Baike, China’s heavily censored Wikipedia rival run by the search engine Baidu. The results are similar on Yahoo, whose search is powered by Bing.
Running the same search in English on Bing generates a list headed by the Dalai Lama’s own website then links to his Wikipedia page and news reports, including one from Phayul.com, a pro-Tibetan independence website. The English search results page also shows images of the Dalai Lama, unlike the Chinese search.
Further searches showed different results in English and Chinese if you were looking for information on Bo Xilai the former Chinese Communist party official who was convicted of corruption and is now serving a life sentence in prison. Any inquiry will turn-up a link to Chinese government site, then his Wikipedia page but no results will appear showing western news articles about him and his crimes.
It's so nice to see Microsoft adding the Chinese government in their efforts to keep its citizenry in the dark by censoring their search results while living in the United States.
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