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Microsoft

Microsoft Tackles 'Horrifying' Bing Search Results (bbc.com) 220

Microsoft has "taken action" to change its Bing search engine after it was found to give "horrifying" results for some terms. From a report: Journalist Chris Hoffman discovered Bing suggested racist topics when he looked up words such as "Jews", "Muslims" and "black people". Bing also ranked widely debunked conspiracy theories among the top suggestions for other words. Mr Hoffman said Microsoft had to do better at moderating its search system. In his investigation, Mr Hoffman looked up racially-themed terms and found that the majority of suggestions for further searches that accompanied results pointed people to racist sites or images. Racist memes and images were also returned for many of the words he tried. "We all know this garbage exists on the web, but Bing shouldn't be leading people to it with their search suggestions," wrote Mr Hoffman. It is believed that the suggestions for further searches connected to these terms have emerged from a combination of user activity and concerted action by far-right groups to skew responses. [...] Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, said: "We take matters of offensive content very seriously and continue to enhance our systems to identify and prevent such content from appearing as a suggested search. As soon as we become aware of an issue, we take action to address it."
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Microsoft Tackles 'Horrifying' Bing Search Results

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  • by macxcool ( 1370409 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:45AM (#57461622)
    I'd appreciate a search engine that gives me exactly what I search for. I can filter things myself and get better at searching and get what I'm looking for that way.
    • How can you filter yourself? If you know the results of a search beforehand, why bother with the search? Surely the point of research/searches is to go beyond what you know and therefore what you can filter.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        All to easy to filter for yourself. Just provide a reason to log into a search engine by allowing users to block web sites from turning up in searches. Over time this block can be used to filter out those crappy sites. They do no want to do this because the worst sites are the ones they are paid to shove in your face over and over and over again. Like all the crap American news sites, corporate propaganda on steroids, the last sites you could be bothered going to for news and yet always the first ones serve

    • by sjbe ( 173966 )

      I'd appreciate a search engine that gives me exactly what I search for.

      No you wouldn't. You want something that will return the information you are seeking. That is often not going to be what you actually searched for. Furthermore that isn't a valid justification for a search engine returning the sorts of "horrifying" results Bing is evidently prone to in places where they should not reasonably be expected.

      I can filter things myself and get better at searching and get what I'm looking for that way.

      Even if true that doesn't mean that is the best way to do it and it also doesn't mean other people want to search that way. I sure as hell value a search engine that isn

      • You are correct. Well, maybe both of you are.

        Sometimes I have no idea what I'm searching for. I have a vague idea, but I don't know what it's called, the words used to describe etc. So I start searching using the words that come to mind to describe it, fail, learn, try again.

        I'd love it if the system could read my mind. If I was speaking with a Reference Librarian s/he would ask me questions and help direct me towards what I wanted.

        However, I probably wouldn't appreciate seeing "horrifying" results. Of

        • Well, when I look up the word "honkey", I want to get a search result to know what it means.

          I just checked, and yup...Bing still gives relevant results.

          Unless of course, that is the only derogatory term that is still PC to say/use....?

    • by MrMr ( 219533 )
      I actually think Bing does very well. If you search for images of 'jews' without any context it, correctly, assumes you're a bigot looking for racist topics. That would also be my first guess from the search command. Good piece of coding, at least better than I would have expected.
    • Huh? A search engine by its very nature filters results. That's the whole reason you provide it with search terms which it uses to filter out things. Otherwise what would be the point?

    • I'd appreciate a search engine that gives me exactly what I search for. I can filter things myself and get better at searching and get what I'm looking for that way.

      And if you build or pay for it then you can have just that.

    • That's a requirement when I know some key words will goto the wrong site or return a BS response.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      So you want to search for "anti-Semitism" to get these results, not "Jew". Or maybe "anti-Semitic conspiracy theories" if you want to read about, say, Cultural Marxism.

  • Just create a list of words for which no suggestions will be provided.

  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:47AM (#57461660)
    If those pages are the type people are reading most often for those given search terms then Bing is doing its job. I don't expect morality to be a weighting factor for a query (horrible as that may be).
    • Search engines aren't supposed to return what is the most popular, but what is the most useful. Nobody ever needs to be told what they already know, only what they need to also know.

      When you have a positive feedback loop, it's always good to stop the cycle before things get destroyed.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        And who decides what is the "most useful" ?

        Bing search:
        Migrate from Windows to Linux

        "Useful" results Microsoft think you need :

        - 10 reasons why you don't want to migrate to Linux
        - Linux is too complicated. Here's why...
        - Think twice before migrating to Linux
        - You can get fired for choosing Linux solutions

        - ... (213 links later) Easy migration guide to Linux

        • by HarrySquatter ( 1698416 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:19PM (#57461936)

          I did a Bing search none of those things were on any of the 5 pages I scrolled. The first result was a linux.com 'Windows to Linux Mogration Guide.' So basically, your post is complete and total bullshit.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Hehehehe, nice!!

        • If I search for that phrase on Bing, the very first item at the top is from Wikihow on how to move from Windows to Linux in 8 steps (with pictures!). They even embed part of the list right in the first result. Step 1 is choose a distro. Step 2 is try the "live CD" versions first. Step 3 is about picking the correct applications to use. Step 4 is about backing up your data (maybe the steps aren't in the right order, but whatever). Etc.

          The second result is the Windows To Linux Migration Guide from linux

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Microsoft decides. It's either that or go back to the 90s when search results were total crap, which is clearly not what most people want or Altavista would have been the pinnacle of search engines.

      • It's not about popularity, certainly not overall popularity. Search engines are optimized towards returning whatever the people searching are actually looking for. If you're the sort who type in a query starting with "the jews", quite likely it's antisemitic material that you're looking for and will find "most useful" (or at least click on, which is all they know). There's no need to assume right-wing manipulation here; I only wish the racist fringe wasted time skewing Bing results on queries made almost 10

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        "Useful" is a loaded term, easily abused. What, for example, would be "useful" to a racist, a sexist, a religious fanatic, or a republican?

      • by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:30PM (#57462054)

        Swedish media have been caught making the decision not to report on events regarding muslim immigrants because those reports would be beneficial for the (politically) unpopular part Sverigedemokraterna. This wasn't about racist memes - it was about choosing not to report factual truth about things that actually happened because it was not politically correct to do so.

        Is that what you want the internet to become? In that case, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Actually it's because they weren't immigrants, they were the children of immigrants, some third generation, born in Sweden. Unless their religion was a particular factor in their crime is irrelevant, same as when Christians and atheists commit random crimes.

          • Which is why the database that the swedish government seized, which shows that 80% of the crimes were being committed by 'migrants' or whatever term you europeans want to label illegals as. Sorry, you can try painting this bullshit whatever way you want. In the UK, you've got all those child rape gangs and those are being committed by people who've migrated. In Canada, we just had our first bust in BC of a child rape/grooming gang...again migrants.

            A girl by the name of Mirassa Shen was murdered in BC...by a 'migrant' who'd been in the country mere months. They charged him with 1st degree murder. Now here's the interesting part, in Canada there are two ways to get a 1st degree murder charge: Premeditation is the first key element here, meaning they had to plan, know, stalk, and then execute their plan. The other way is by rape and murder. Police have already stated that there was no premeditation, that neither person knew each other. So let's finish up, because I'll keep it in Canada. There are now hotels and motels being used as "migrant shelters" vandalism, theft, assault 1, robbery 1&2, sexual assault(1 - not rape), sexual assault(2 - rape) are clustered around these places. They're not shitholes in the cities, these places are in the downtown core in many cases.

            But by all means, keep pretending that importing people who are culturally non-compatible, believe that they can "take" whatever they want, that women are worth less then a man. Are doing great things for society...

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Again, most of the child rapists in the UK were second or third generation, i.e. born in Britain and British citizens. The fact that they were mostly Asian and Muslim has been discussed on major TV programmes extensively, and in newspapers and in Parliament and at the inquest into what happened.

              What upsets people is that these discussions don't consider the fake news reports, so they think things are being covered up.

              • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

                Again, most of the child rapists in the UK were second or third generation, i.e. born in Britain and British citizens. The fact that they were mostly Asian and Muslim has been discussed on major TV programmes extensively, and in newspapers and in Parliament and at the inquest into what happened.

                Uh...the inquest stated that most of the people were immigrants who'd been in the UK for a period greater then 1 year. The average time they'd been in the country was 4 years. That doesn't make them 1st generation. And being born in another country and immigrating with your parents doesn't make you 1st generation either.

                What upsets people is that these discussions don't consider the fake news reports, so they think things are being covered up.

                So what's "fake news" about it happening over and over again, the police, councils, and child protection services covering it up. And then when there's an inquiry into it, the inquiry co

        • by jd ( 1658 )

          You're equating absence of signal with absence of noise.

          Signal and noise are not the same, never were.

          • by Calydor ( 739835 )

            No, I am equating some guy in the media getting to decide what is politically correct for people to learn, and some guy in Microsoft or Google doing the exact same thing.

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        When you have a positive feedback loop, it's always good to stop the cycle before things get destroyed.

        But that's the entire premise of Google search: it filters your results to those that are like results you've previously clicked on. It's call the "search bubble", and they keep you in your bubble. Most people think the results are better; me, I'm horrified at the concept and use DDG.

        But the "search bubble" Google traps uyou in is probably why peole think this is a "Bing problem": Google by design would only show racist search results to racists.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:50AM (#57461682)

    reason I sometimes use Bing. Thanks for killing the one advantage Bing had.

    • not even a little bit. It's safe to say that if I go to bing and search for "Jewish" that I probably don't want pro-Nazi propaganda. The percentage of people searching for issues related to, say the Jewish religion is probably a bit higher than the percentage of white supremacists. The same is true for searching for "Black Lives Matters".

      You can still find the neo-Nazi sites, but you have to search for them in a way you would expect (e.g. search for "White Power" or "Neo Nazi"). What Bing is trying to f
      • It's safe to say that if I go to bing and search for "Jewish" that I probably don't want pro-Nazi propaganda.

        Apparently, odds are that you do.

      • by Raenex ( 947668 )

        It's safe to say that if I go to bing and search for "Jewish" that I probably don't want pro-Nazi propaganda.

        You changed "Jews" to "Jewish". Are you going to pretend "Jews" aren't widely talked about, often in a negative fashion? Also note that the author clicked on an "evil jew" suggestion... and was surprised to find Nazi propagana?

        Let's try another one: white people. One of the Bing's image suggestions is "white people looting". Probably because people search for that as a counter to blacks looting.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Bing is heavily censored. They even operate in China, that's how good their censorship tech is.

  • It is rather amusing to watch this thing that we here at /. 20 years ago assumed would usher in a new era of transnational singularity-driven technocracy. .. ...

    Yet it turns out fuuucking /pol/ is always right. fuck. I never wanted to end up knowing all this shit.

  • it depends (Score:2, Interesting)

    The problem is that anyone who's been awake in the last few years knows that not everything called racist actually is racist, in any meaningful way.

    Who gets to decide? Well, in the past, you did (modulo a large bunch of publishers and broadcasters and libraries and such).

    Now? Something gets "deplatformed" and you will never see it to decide for yourself. It's too easy now to just "disappear" people and ideas.

    I have no problem with filters per se, as long as they are accessible - I generally have Google's

  • Google and Bing are very different in wholesomeness.

    Googling "Girl Licking Tits" would probably show you pictures of a girl licking British song birds as top image result.
    Bing search "McDonalds" would probably show you a picture of Ronald having a threesome with the Hamburgler and that purple blob creature as top image result.

    FYI I, for good reason, haven't actually done either of the searches above- these responses are dramatazisations.

    • As a test, I searched 'girls licking tits' on both Bing and Google. The results are indistinguishable. Porn, lots of porn. On both standard and image search. When I tried again with safesearch mode on, however.... google returns no images, and bing shows a warning that results were blocked due to safesearch.

      There is one difference, however. Google has search filtering on or off. Bing has three levels, of which the 'moderate' is the default. On this default, bing blocked the image search, but did not filter

      • Found it: On default settings, Bing's image filtering proves quite ineffective in filtering a query on 'yiff.' My speculation is that their filtering algorithm might be based in part upon image feature extraction, and so less effective on artwork than upon the photos upon which it was trained. It does block a lot of material, but more than enough slips through to make for a rather interesting page of image results.

        They did have the foresight to block any query on 'hentai.' I tried that one first, but it mus

      • It is worth noting that both engines, when in their strictest filtering mode, outright refused to process the query in any manner - returning either no results (google) or no results and a suggestion to turn filtering off (bing).

        This suggests a striking lack of content online concerning the habit that British women have of licking their songbirds. See, you can't trust search engines.

      • As a test, I searched 'girls licking tits' on both Bing and Google.

        Thank you for doing this in the name of science! :)

        I was obviously exaggerating the difference between Google and Bing; however, I've learnt the hard way not to use bing image search when I have people in my office and I need to look for an image for a project. Innocent search terms seem to pull up less than innocent results. It could be anecdotal, I've heard other people have the same issue.

        It would be interesting to do an in depth study on this. How do I get government funding?

      • As a test, I searched 'girls licking tits' on both Bing and Google. The results are indistinguishable. Porn, lots of porn.

        As it should be.

    • > Girl Licking Tits

      /Sarcasm Oooh a new fetish to search for! How do I filter out the boobies and only include the birds?

      Oh wait, did I say that out loud? :-)

  • ... words combined with each other: racists nutcases and people looking for something to be offended by.

    • Exactly. And as soon as Bing does exactly what one expects it to do--show the most-clicked items--then the person who looked to be offended can be satisfied that his fears are well-proven, that indeed this shows "concerted action by far-right groups to skew responses." Of course far-right (or the media's beloved alt-right) people are not the only ones who are racist and who click on racist memes. But as long as we can play the blame game and "prove" the evil of some sinister Other, then we can be well-assur
  • The last time I used Bing, I was searching for something innocuous.

    Every result I got was one of my search words used in "www.<word>.com/", or something very similar. Every one was the root of the website that it returned.

    Utterly Useless.

  • A cynic might suggest that anybody stupid enough to use Bing would probably want this kind of thing to turn up near the top of their searches.

  • Bing is returning search results with questionable content? I really hope people realize this is not Bing's issue, it's the sites with the questionable content that have been indexed by Bing's crawler.

    Wagging your finger at Microsoft is pretty silly, they did nothing wrong, they just indexed what's out there, same as any other search engine.

    If people want this kind of stuff to go away, perhaps you should thank Bing for exposing it for you, then go after the sites where the content is actually hosted.

  • https://www.bing.com/search?q=... [bing.com]

    Bing Search for Jews. Not horrifying at all.

  • Why tf are you using Bing? This sounds more like advertising for them (in the "no news is bad news" sense).

  • It seems that Microsoft does not instruct its spiders to obey the robots.txt instructions I provide. The spiders download parts of the site that I do not want indexed. When I talked with the bing support people on this, they said something along the lines of, "yeah, it's a known bug in the spider." Yet they do not fix it. So I just block the spider now. Microsoft's QA quality problems seem to extend from Windows 10 updates to Bing spiders. Maybe the reality is just that Microsoft is a bug-laden compa
  • People are growing interested in these things, so they type them into search engines.

    If we really live in an open society, the only response is to ignore this and publish your own views instead.

  • Thats not a search product that's just public relations branding.
    Let people search for and find what they want. Its their internet.
  • We saw this same story with the instant search results in Safari - just more propaganda to allow the media to engage in censorship and propaganda by selecting what you may see. And it's not like they're going to stop at blocking, say, Holocaust Denial when someone searches for "Jews". They'll also block shit like anyone who questions the conspiracy theories that Trump worked with Russia to steal an election, or that Assad decides to gas his own people whenever US politicians try to back away from regime c

  • Initially I was excited to hear that Microsoft was finally acknowledging their search engine was absolute garbage... until I continued reading to discover they plan to make it even worse.
  • Why is this "news"? You search for something and you find good and bad things. So. Fucking. What.

    Meh.

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