More on Bing removing UK content

Regular readers will know that I identified a search in the UK version of Bing which indicated that content had been removed from the search results. If you've not seen it you can read it at Phil Bradley's weblog: Bing: excluding results from UK version? Stefan from Microsoft kindly responded to say the following:

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.

Now I don't want to be particularly obtuse on this, but as far as I'm concerned this raises a bunch of other questions:

Who sends Microsoft such notices? How does Microsoft check their validity? Does Microsoft tell the website owner their content has been removed? How is removing content but not telling users what content has been removed 'improve the customer experience'?

Clearly Microsoft is only going to remove 'that which is necessary' - but necessary to who? If Microsoft is choosing to remove material that it believes is appropriate why are they making that decision, and upon what grounds? What are the 'local public policy decisions', and why are these not made public?

I fully accept that it's possible to view content from other versions of Bing, which I illustrated in the previous post. Consequently, is there any real point in removing content in one version when I can simply go elsewhere to see exactly the same material?

I'm pleased to see that they're looking into this result. Let me help further. Every single Martin Luther King search I ran, including the 'Related searches' resulted in the results removed message. I'm pretty sure that what's been removed is reference to the martinlutherking dot org site (which is a site that I have NO time for and think it's vile), but this isn't made clear. All I know is that Microsoft is not letting me see all the results, isn't telling me WHY I can't see all the results and is also not telling me which pages I cannot see. This is not helpful.

I'm am further confused because the said website is available if I search on Google, Ask, and Exalead, though it's missing entirely from Yahoo. Now, if someone or some authority in the UK wanted that site removed why didn't they also request removal from those search engines as well?

I'm just as confused as ever - if not more so!