Dealing with China and Chinese Government in general can be a tricky area for many companies. If you want to do business in China you’re almost certainly going to have to change some of your company policy in order to continue to operate. This is never seen more than on the internet, where normally liberal websites and blogs have to tone down their content in order to be allowed into Chinas firewall.

Google is certainly a key example of this – the company censor results on the Tiananmen Square massacre when logging into their Chinese service at google.cn. However, if you access the same information from google.com, you’ll see an uncensored set of results.

It’s Bing that’s really in the spotlight here though, with a censorship regime that’s gone beyond simply complying with Chinese law. Using simplified Chinese characters, a search on Bing for the Tiananmen Square massacre anywhere in the world will result in censored results. Even if you’re in the UK or the USA and you search using Chinese letters, you’ll find it difficult to get any evidence that suggests any protest ever took place.

This isn’t something has popped up this week though – it was reported by the NY Times blogger Nicholas Kristof nearly six months ago. Microsoft refused to admit error until screenshots had been sent and then insisted that the problem was a bug that would shortly be fixed.

Then Microsoft said that the problem is with the search algorithm and then any search conducted in a native language will give disproportionate results skewed towards the country in question – in this case, China and Chinese propaganda.

As pointed out by Kristof, there are a number of problems with that story – chiefly the fact that this wasn’t the official Microsoft line when the company was originally questioned. Nor does it explain why Wikipedia isn’t featured higher on the list or why there’s a massive difference between images and text results.

Microsoft have since replied to the criticisms on the Bing blog, but are still yet to fix the “bug” that has caused all the problems with image search:

“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.”

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 3:01 amand is filed under Bing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.