Well, here's a thing. Go to the US version of Bing (top right hand corner, choose US instead of UK) and run a search for martin luther king. You'll get a bunch of results, with the infamous martinlutherking dot org site in fifth place. That had been the point of the search I was running, just to see if they were going to include it or not. However, that's not what actually ended up interesting me. If you run the same search in the UK version you get very different results. No links to images or local for example, (which doesn't surprise me, since they're rolling out slightly different versions depending on country and that's fine if they want to do it that way), but the related searches are different. Again, not a particular issue since I would expect slightly different UK/US searches. The actual results are different as well which again doesn't surprise me, and any decent search engine would do the same.
No, the thing that interests me is that down at the bottom of the UK results page. We don't have the martinlutherking dot org site listed, and what we do have is:
'Some results have been removed'. At first I thought this was because of the settings that I had, so I checked to make sure that nothing was being filtered. Re-ran the search and got the same result. I clicked on the link, which took me to the help pages, but no-where did it tell me what that meant, or why it was there.
There wasn't any point in trying to work out exactly what results differed and why, because two different country searches will give different results. However, I did run a search on the UK version that should have pulled up the dot org site if it was in the UK version of the database, but it's not there. It seems therefore that this particular site is unavailable for UK viewers. I next tried the Irish site, and things get even more interesting. The US version has the site in 5th place as I mentioned, with a summary of "The truth about Martin Luther King: Includes historical trivia, articles and pictures. A valuable resource for teachers and students alike." In the Irish version the same site is in second place, with a summary of "Essays, speeches, sermons, and history from a decidedly adversarial viewpoint." The Australian result in the same as the Irish version, as are the ones from New Zealand, South Africa, while in the Argentina version the site has the same summary, but the result is in 5th place again.
I did some more hunting around, but all the other versions that I looked at (though to be fair I didn't try them all) contained the same site. It's only in the UK version that the site appears to have been excluded (or censored if you prefer), and I'm wondering why that's the case. What is so objectionable about the site (and to be fair it's an objectionable site anyway) that it's unfit for UK eyes?
I don't have an answer for this, and I'm not even 100% sure I'm right, but I'd be really interested in learning more about this. Why is the UK the only version that I've seen that has removed results, why can't I view what they are, what is the purpose of it, and why is it ok for the rest of the world to see results that we can't view in the UK?
Stefan from Bing here - the engineering head in Germany is looking into it... More to come.
Posted by: Stefan Weitz | June 02, 2009 at 03:59 PM
Thank you Stefan, it's appreciated.
Posted by: Phil Bradley | June 02, 2009 at 04:02 PM
Hey there - Did some digging on this. We occasionally receive notice that content accessible through our search service presents legal or public policy concerns such as potential harms to privacy, intellectual property rights, or the potential exploitation of children. In such cases, we may remove certain links from our search index or not return results for certain search terms in order to improve the customer experience for search results we deliver. When we do so, we indicate to users that content was removed, attempt to limit both the amount of content removed to only that which is necessary, and limit the geographic scope of removal only to the markets where we believe such removal is appropriate, for example, given local public policy considerations. The consequence, in some cases, may be that different results appear in different versions that are tailored to local markets.
It is important to note, however, that users are not limited to one version of Bing and can choose to run queries on versions tailored to other markets.
We are looking into this particular result in the UK.
Posted by: Stefan | June 04, 2009 at 10:11 PM