Boycott Microsoft Bing by Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times claims Microsoft is “sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing.” It is believes that Microsoft is censoring their search results to appease the Chinese government.

Microsoft responded to this criticism with their blog post named committed to comprehensive results. Microsoft said they fixed a bug over the summer and discovered a new bug over the weekend with image search and using Simplified Chinese characters outside of the PRC. Microsoft said the “bug” will be fixed before the Thanksgiving holiday, which is this coming Thursday.

Kristof from the New York Time doesn’t seem to believe Microsoft and says he is “very skeptical” that this “bug” will be fixed properly. Kristof has shared dated screen captures of the queries that generated “bugs” or censored results.

Censorship, search engines and China have a long history. China, Censorship & Google Redux from Greg is likely one of the more recent write ups we have on the topic.

Related Topics: Legal: Censorship | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Outside US

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn