Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

https://www.howtogeek.com/367878/bing-is-suggesting-the-worst-things-you-can-imagine/

by basicplus2 • 8 years ago

55 62 8 years ago

howtogeek.com

s9w3• 8 years ago

This article is straight up asking for censorship. Nothing else.

83457• 8 years ago

Correct. They are literally asking that the censorship feature to work as expected.

s9w3• 8 years ago

SafeSearch definition says: "filter out adult text, images, and videos". It's not about racism. So it's working as expected

ubernostrum3• 8 years ago

Flip this around:

There are at the very least billions of possible search term refinements and pieces of content which are not currently actively suggested. Is your position that, because they are not being suggested at this moment, they are being censored?

s9w3• 8 years ago

The suggestions are being computed by an algorithm. If you take things away from those it's censorship.

Nasrudith• 8 years ago

Personally I find that brutal honesty about its search suggestions refreshing as opposed to manually excluding anything remotely controversial. Although the reality is probably that somebody is spoofing the search suggestions for laughs above and beyond morbid curiosity and jokes of debatable taste akin to searching for nuclear warheads on eBay.

sam_goody2• 8 years ago

The issue is that once these thoughts and articles are suggested, they become much more mainstream.

Try something less controversial, robbery. No doubt, people search for "how to break into houses", and you might even click on that link if it was a top suggestion. But if people saw that all the time, there would be an increase in robberies, and a decrease in the feeling that it matters.

And just because it generates traffic, doesn't mean it is what most people are really looking for!

It just means that it has appeal because of the way we are wired to respond to things that are outrageous. Once it is a suggestion (even at the end of the list) it will get clicks, and move up till it dominates.

jstanley3• 8 years ago

Once it is a suggestion (even at the end of the list) it will get clicks, and move up till it dominates.

So why isn't every article that has ever been suggested moving up until it dominates?

jakobegger4• 8 years ago

I think you underestimate how many pedophiles are out there.

avip• 8 years ago

As a jew, I can't decide which one is more offensive: The dumb Antisemitic suggestions from Bing, or Jew Jitsu being the top autocompletion on Chrome. Hey Google! There are 14M of us, give some credit.

shroom• 8 years ago

Reading your comment I reacted with 14M not being a lot at all. I was surprised to find out it is true.

Having no knowledge of this before I’ve always assumed this number would be higher. Based on influence I guess.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country

pjc503• 8 years ago

It would have been a lot higher if six million hadn't been murdered.

lake993• 8 years ago

That was my first thought too. But then, I live in Bangalore, and my sense of proportion is biased by this. The Jewish population is about the same as my city's.

mosselman3• 8 years ago

Not the main point of the article, so off topic, but isn’t “underage children” a pleonasm? Or is it a term that respects that we are all someone’s child, so also when we reach adulthood?

The term seems to suggest there is an age from which it is acceptable for children to receive sexual attention from adults. I prefer to think that there is no such age. Most people would probably agree with this.

Pleonasms are very common; “your personal belongings” is a funny one. In the case of ‘underage children’ though, it undermines the message.

yorwba2• 8 years ago

Most people would probably agree with this.

I think you might be overestimating how common your opinion is. In many (maybe most) countries, children are considered capable of consent even before they are granted all privileges of adulthood. Sometimes it's only if the partner is underage as well, but then one will be an adult sooner than the other, so there are exceptions for cases where the age difference is small.

Because of the various exceptions in traditional consent law in contrast to bright-line rules against child pornography (below 18 is illegal, no exceptions), it's possible for legal sex to become illegal as soon as there's a camera between the participants.

The best-known cases are probably of teens being prosecuted for child pornography when they take nude selfies.

mosselman3• 8 years ago

What you say is true for interpersonal relationships. The article is about imagery with an erotic element. So in the context of erotic photography I think that most countries would consider participation of children illegal and I think most people would agree with that.

So I'd think that in the context of the article it could be a pleonasm, but an understandable one then.

henriquemaia• 8 years ago

Well, you can have shared belongings, as with things you own with your family members (usually spouse). So my personal belongings is a valid distinction, not a pleonasm.

mosselman3• 8 years ago

It depends on the context. In case of selling a house while you have shared belongings with the neighbours, then yes. When the train conductor says: "Don't forget your personal belongings when leaving the train", then it is a pleonasm as the distinction is probably not intentional; I doubt the conductor wants you to leave your shared belongings in the train.

anonytrary3• 8 years ago

At least searching "muslims are" in Bing gives you honest autocompletes that reflect what people actually search for. Google, on the other hand, evidently censors content it deems to be offensive. If you search "muslims are" in Google, there are no autocomplete results at all. I doubt Google does not have enough data on "muslims are *" searches

I have safe search off, meaning I don't want to be patronized when I am searching things. I would much rather know what people search for than have Google treat me like I'm their child with their hands covering my eyes during the dirty scenes.

jakobegger4• 8 years ago

Some things should not be autocompleted. I can't think of a reason why a search engine should suggest a completion if you start typing something generic like "xyz are ...".

anonytrary3• 8 years ago

Searching "muslims are vegetarian" could be seen as another way to search "are muslims vegetarian". A good search engine lets you search query soup like this. They don't necessarily return the same results, but people are pretty bad at querying.

gear54rus3• 8 years ago

except it does suggest if you type 'people are...'

some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn't see, there's no other explanation :)

charlesism• 8 years ago

    > I don't want to be patronized when I am searching things.

It's more like they're removing the penis graffiti.

Most of the time, I search to find some content. You are probably the same. It's a search engine. Considerations aside from whether a search suggestion helps one locate desired content are beside the point. What's more, in some of the author's cases, the content would be illegal.

If you are serious about researching search trends, then you could use tools, or lobby for more tools, like https://trends.google.com

boffinism2• 8 years ago

The point of autocompletes is to make it easier for you to search by prompting you to choose a readymade option that might be relevant. They happen to use what other people search for, but that's an implementation detail. It's not that Bing is showing you the uncensored truth about what people search for, it's that it's prompting you to search for really bad things.

Al-Khwarizmi• 8 years ago

I have just tried "muslims are" on bing.com right now and I get a single autocomplete result: "muslims are treated fairly". And "black people are" yields nothing at all.

Unless it's a regional thing, it seems that someone at Bing has read this news and now they are censoring exactly like Google.

If I try those same searches in Spanish, I do get some racist suggestions though. Probably not for long...

threatofrain2• 8 years ago

When one types a query, why should a search engine model search success based on what everyone else in the world searches up? Doesn't it matter more that Google finds what that person wants?

And if individuals want to understand Google Search Trends, as noted already, it's there but I don't think many people are going there, because it's not what they want.

dorchadas2• 8 years ago

When one types a query, why should a search engine model search success based on what everyone else in the world searches up? Doesn't it matter more that Google finds what that person wants?

That's exactly what I want, at least. It'd make much more sense for them to just work on autocompleting individual words instead of queries. That way it's useful to the person who's searching and it doesn't matter what everyone else searched.

sgt101• 8 years ago

It doesn't suggest those things for me - did they fix it or is this a case of personalisation?

pjgrad• 8 years ago

As the article states, Microsoft took note of it and started correcting some of the suggestions.

johnpowell• 8 years ago

The article is 2.5 weeks old. Maybe the people at Bing cleaned it up a bit.

klohto• 8 years ago

Why does everyone need to have a safe space? Bing suggestions work perfectly fine without patronizing and treating you like a dumb child that doesn't know how to use internet.

boffinism2• 8 years ago

A bunch of people who use Bing are children who don't know how to use the internet.

pembrook• 8 years ago

So the slippery slope here is: if you're 12 and see an algorithm autocomplete "muslims are [insert racist thing]," its going turn you into a racist by suggestion?

The reason autocomplete results end up this way is because the humans this kid lives around are racists. Those people will be the reason the kid grows up racist, not some 2nd tier search engine. Why lie to the kid and pretend like the community he/she lives in doesn't have a problem?

I've never understood this bizarre desire we have to hide reality from children to keep them ignorant (or more commonly referred to as "innocent"). As if they can't observe the objective reality around them. The sooner they can understand the problems with the world the sooner their generation can work toward fixing them.

scoot_718• 8 years ago

Sure, but google image search gives spam results from Pinterest, so Bing still wins.

lake993• 8 years ago

What? I tried these searches out when the article was just three hours old on HN. I could not reproduce any of these results. Safe Search was set "Moderate", and my results did not change significantly when I switched it to "Off".

The worst it got for me was when I asked for autocomplete suggestions for "muslims are":

    good
    hindu
    worst
    cancer
    killed

Disclosure: I performed these searches from India. I'm open to the possibility that there could be regional factors worsening the search results in the US. Even so, I can't imagine what Indian customizations would make my search suggestions for "Michelle Obama" so innocuous compared to what I see in the article.

pjc503• 8 years ago

Not so much autocomplete suggestions, but the autosuggested related searches under Image Search.

In my case I got shown "muslims are scum" and "muslims are terrorists", in the UK. "Michelle Obama" got suggested "... muscles"?

lake993• 8 years ago

No, I had looked at those too. Both under Image Search (for Jews, Muslims, and "gril") and under Videos (for Michelle Obama). All the related searches were completely innocuous. The autocomplete suggestions were the least innocuous ones I got. Looking for "gril" got me images of girls, but all completely SFW or child-safe.

puranjay• 8 years ago

This article assumes that Bing is in the business of telling people what to think

It's not; it's in the business of showing what people think

pjc503• 8 years ago

No, a search engine literally tells you what to look at, based on what you told it. And for many people there's a short path between seeing and believing.

The autocomplete suggestions are a suggestion: would you like to search for this? And in the minds of many people that normalises it.

"Stochastic terrorism" is a real problem. You've got one guy mailing out bombs and another shooting up a synagogue based on lies they read on the internet, just this past week. This stuff has consequences.

vidanay• 8 years ago

I once did a search on Bing for a .NET topic and Bing didn't even return any Microsoft documentation results.

Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

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