Bing accused of out-censoring the Great Firewall

Agreed

I'll agree with that. As much as I would like to use Bing their results simply stink. I now use DuckDuckGo but their categorization of results is not much better - for example, DuckDuckGo "Dell XPS" and you get:

- (top of page) a link to the Wiki article on Dell XPS

- (next paragraph down) a sponsored link to Dell's laptop XPS line

- (main search results) a SINGLE Dell XPS result, as search result #2, and again to their laptop line

Google "Dell XPS" and you get:

- (top of page) a sponsored link to Dell's XPS laptops (on sale)

- (second paragraph) a sponsored link to Best Buy's Dell XPS [laptop] page

- (main search results) links to Dell's XPS desktop AND laptop pages, taking up search results numbers 1, 2, AND 3

Big difference. And I'm only using that search term as an example, it happens all too often for me on many of my DDG searches and I find that inexcusable - DDG should show their search results based upon the inherent rankings of the search engines behind the anonymizer.

Re: Never confuse malice-

That was the comment that sprung to mind before I read the article, I assume (yeah I know) they check the results against Bing from elsewhere to see what was filtered.

Is it possible that the other native search engines get a way with a little more or maybe are not filtering things they should? I can't remember the last time I stuck up for MIcrosoft but maybe they are erring on the side of caution, the Chinese government are a bit picky after all.

Re: Never confuse malice-

What is it with Microsoft and search? They have a long history of failure to make it work as expected.

They always seem to have imagined that the primary role of a search engine is to find reasons for not showing things. Early versions of Windows file search were limited to "known file types" by default. Even today, I can enter "foo.bar" in the Windows 7 Explorer search box and get no results, when "dir /s foo.bar" returns a result.

All Microsoft search facilities should have a checkbox labelled "Don't try to be clever, just show me the effing files".

Re: I just hope...

Nothing specific to Microsoft. Many if not most businesses when faced with the choice of conforming to local laws or not doing business don't chose the "not doing business" option.

Nothing personal, it's just business, they say.

Sad, perhaps, but true.