There’s been some buzz today based on a post by Nicholas D. Kristof at the New York Times suggesting that Bing filters results for searches conducted outside of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) using Simplified Chinese characters for their query.
As Mr. Kristof reported over the summer, we did fix a bug in web search that addressed this issue. There are some queries that provide very balanced web results, for example 六四 天安门 (June 4th Tiananmen). We recognize that we can continue to improve our relevancy and comprehensiveness in these web results and we will.
In addition, today’s investigations uncovered the fact that our image search is not functioning properly for queries entered using Simplified Chinese characters outside of the PRC. We have identified the bug and are at work on the fix. We expect to have this done before the Thanksgiving holiday.
Bing’s intent for these types of queries is to provide relevant and comprehensive results for our customers.
We appreciate the dialog that Mr. Kristof has kicked off. Community feedback and input is incredibly important to Bing – it helps us do better and sometimes alerts us to things we can take immediate action to fix as we continue to improve.
Adam Sohn – Senior Director, Bing
