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

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.

categoriaSearch Engine commento1 Comment dataJune 3rd, 2009
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Yahoo v Google for Election in India

By Charles-Henry Ruyant

New battle between the two online giants: the online coverage of the Indian election 2009.

 

Everything is ready to attract new users. And we can see that Google and Yahoo have definitely chosen the right country to fight over, with over 45 million  internet users in India. And the Indian internet market is growing pretty quickly. So what have the done for the Indian election 2009? Both of them have now made a micro site about this election:

 

Yahoo Site - Indian Election

Yahoo Site - Indian Election

 

http://in.elections.yahoo.com/ from Yahoo! and

 

Google Site - Indian Election

Google Site - Indian Election

 

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/ from Google.

 

My first impression is that Yahoo! has made a far better job of it than Google on this one. The design and structure of the information is very well done particularly in comparison with  Google’s attempt. Google has just created an iGoogle page for this election; not that user friendly!

 

We can also see that Yahoo!, unlike Google, is trying to make some money via advertising to finance this initiative. I imagine that this is because Yahoo has spent a lot more money on this project than Google and need to recoup their financial investment.

 

But the investment (time and money) is very little compared to the amount put in to the American election few months ago (obviously from an American company this is no big surprise).

 

It is hard to know who will be the big winner of this battle but one thing is sure Yahoo has come up with the best website, but the funny thing is on the first page of Yahoo result page,  for the keyword ‘Lok Sabha Elections 2009’ we cannot find the Yahoo site – a mistake not made by Google.com ;)

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