Bing censures sex in India

By Charles-Henry Ruyant

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing,released on Monday, is trying to respect the Indian law regarding online pornography. In India it is illegal to transmit or publish any pornographic material.

When you are using the keyword ‘sex’ in India, Bing will refuse to display any search result. Maybe it is a little bit too drastic; why not use a parental filter in order to display other websites without any pornographic content but still relevant to sex (e.g.: medical websites).

Bing - Sex in India

Google did not bother with this measure and displays very easily pornographic material on its results page.

Also any promotion of abortion is illegal but both search engines provide information on the topic. As far as I know none of these companies as been legally penalised for these practices…

Anyway, all these different local laws are a big issue for the global search engines. This probably why in some countries the local search engines have still a big part of the market.