Just submitted this, or something similar, to Techcrunch…
I was reading the story on Huffington Post (via Digg) over lunch, on the senator admitting he’s gay (“Roy Ashburn: ‘I’m Gay’” – an interesting story on its own). I scrolled down and noticed a video section. Inside the Bing widget is a link to the search on Bing Video’s (the issue does not show here). The link takes you to the bing video search page (assuming you have not changed your default safe search option from the default “Moderate” to “Off”) stating:
“The search Roy Ashburn gay may return explicit adult content and has been filtered by your Bing SafeSearch settings.”
Performing the same search on Google Video did not filter the results, while also being on the “Moderate” default Google safe search option, and returned some 26 results.
Others should confirm this, but I’ve tried it across two systems (default settings – not signed into Bing/Google – from Australia) and the “explicit adult content” warning seems to be simply triggered by “gay”, but also “homosexual” and “lesbian”.
Testing items like “gay rights”, “homosexual rights” shows they are all filtered by this as a result… Really… they could very easily hide any truly adult videos from the search, but instead its completely blocked out. Personally, I’m not gay, but I’m more than willing to stand up for the equal treatment of people regardless of sexual orientation, as should anyone. “Gay” and “Homosexual” should not be considered explicit searches – all this does is slow down the acceptance, and the move towards anti-discrimination of homosexuality in our society. Microsoft should correct this quickly… I think others in the industry would be aware that this sort of thing has been a significant issue before.
Edit: Revised grammar.. have not written in awhile – tried to write this up quickly!
Edit 2: Screenshots. And testing while the locality is set to “United States” produces the same issue.
Edit 3: Looks like something similar has been rolled out to Arab countries?
Edit 4: Also weird is that it doesn’t seem to happen on the Bing Mobile version on my iPhone (except when you switch to “Desktop” mode in Safari, its blocked)
Edit 5: It seems like bing video will often, if not always just completely block results in safesearch if a blacklisted keyword pops up, rather than just filtering out the undesirable content like google does – it occurs for alot of terms, like “hardcore”. I still find it questionable that they’re filtering these terms, though. Needs fixing.
Bing search issue 1
Bing search issue 2
Bing Video Search filtering out “gay” and “homosexual” by default
Just submitted this, or something similar, to Techcrunch…
I was reading the story on Huffington Post (via Digg) over lunch, on the senator admitting he’s gay (“Roy Ashburn: ‘I’m Gay’” – an interesting story on its own). I scrolled down and noticed a video section. Inside the Bing widget is a link to the search on Bing Video’s (the issue does not show here). The link takes you to the bing video search page (assuming you have not changed your default safe search option from the default “Moderate” to “Off”) stating:
Performing the same search on Google Video did not filter the results, while also being on the “Moderate” default Google safe search option, and returned some 26 results.
Others should confirm this, but I’ve tried it across two systems (default settings – not signed into Bing/Google – from Australia) and the “explicit adult content” warning seems to be simply triggered by “gay”, but also “homosexual” and “lesbian”.
Testing items like “gay rights”, “homosexual rights” shows they are all filtered by this as a result… Really… they could very easily hide any truly adult videos from the search, but instead its completely blocked out. Personally, I’m not gay, but I’m more than willing to stand up for the equal treatment of people regardless of sexual orientation, as should anyone. “Gay” and “Homosexual” should not be considered explicit searches – all this does is slow down the acceptance, and the move towards anti-discrimination of homosexuality in our society. Microsoft should correct this quickly… I think others in the industry would be aware that this sort of thing has been a significant issue before.
Edit: Revised grammar.. have not written in awhile – tried to write this up quickly!
Edit 2: Screenshots. And testing while the locality is set to “United States” produces the same issue.
Edit 3: Looks like something similar has been rolled out to Arab countries?
Edit 4: Also weird is that it doesn’t seem to happen on the Bing Mobile version on my iPhone (except when you switch to “Desktop” mode in Safari, its blocked)
Edit 5: It seems like bing video will often, if not always just completely block results in safesearch if a blacklisted keyword pops up, rather than just filtering out the undesirable content like google does – it occurs for alot of terms, like “hardcore”. I still find it questionable that they’re filtering these terms, though. Needs fixing.
Bing search issue 1
Bing search issue 2