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Comment by froo | Hacker News Reader

... and so the trolling begins.

Seriously though, this is news on HN why? MS not allowing a sexual term in India.. ooo, what about Google helping the Indian authorities on the arrest of an Orkut user over making comments about a Political leader in India, even though freedom of speech is one of the six fundamental rights the Indian Constitution grants its citizens.

Which do you think is the worse of the two?

It's not that I'm pro-bing, I'm just anti-anti-bing. How about we give the site a few months to fuckup before we start with the comments like above.

I'd much rather see people judge the site based on its merits rather than get so instantly polarised before it's had a chance to find its footing.

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Well it's simple I'm currently living in Malaysia if a search engine doesn't allow me to search for things I'm not going to use it...

I'm not much pro-google either for the reason above... It's just that I think such action from MS is short-sighted (and don't tell me it's because of the local regulations since Google and Yahoo here do search for those terms).

Now it's true I guess it doesn't add much to the discussion, it's just that I'm quite irritated when I see a company that self-censors in order to get the local governments to appreciate them.

Well, simple question... have you used Bing extensively before today? If so, have you searched for content of a sexual nature and if not, do you honestly care?

For all we know, it could have been an oversight on MS's part (the site is less than a week old) and it will be a simple case of switching on or off a setting eventually, like what you can do with Google.

EDIT - I signed into Bing using my Live account and noticed theres a setting to filter sexually explicit content like with Google, so perhaps this is the same thing, maybe you just need to sign in to do it.

EDIT #2 - I just switched to India & Malaysia's settings (was on Australia) and noticed that you couldn't set location or the sexual settings (seemed like a recurring theme), but then switched to China and noticed you could set Location, so perhaps its just a bug

I switched to bing as my main search engine 3 days ago to test it out (I like the idea of having more than one search engine with significant market shares so I had to give it a try). Now it's true I hadn't search any content that triggered the filter in that time (I don't only think about that :-) ) but not long ago I was looking at what was the legality of having pornographic photos uploaded by users in a user generated content site and if it was better to filter them out systematically or wait for members to report such photos and those search wouldn't have worked on bing.

But as said, it's mostly an emotional argument on my part because I don't like companies to self-censor themselves when they could help the countries to become more opened..

I've also signed into Bing with a live account and didn't notice such a setting... maybe it's also disabled in Malaysia? Anyhow, I'm one of those strange people who block the google, bing and yahoo cookie because I don't really want search engines to have a complete history of my searches associated with my profile so this wouldn't be enough...

EDIT: Small fact in passing: while it blocks the english term 'sex', it doesn't block the malay word 'seks'... Strange now this term is also blocked??

How do you explain them blocking "sexual healing" in Germany?

That is a complete fuck up of the highest order IMHO.

There's an easy hack around that I just came up with while throwing terms at Bing and switching locales - just add a stop word (a word that search engines often ignore to conserve space) after the topic you're looking for and you can search for it.

In my case, I added "the"

EG, Sexual Healing in germany, search for "sexual healing the", and it comes up with what you're looking for.

I just tried "sex the" with India... searches just fine.

Basically, I'd suggest it's an unintended feature.

eg the blocking is both broken, and easily bypassed.

I never suggested it wasn't broken, I commented hours ago that some of the settings don't seem to be consistent.

Easily bypassed, well - that's just funny.

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