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Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

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Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#31

Post by gear54rus »

jakobegger wrote: post #19
anonytrary wrote: post #16

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 s…

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 ...".

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 :)

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#33

Post by jstanley »

jakobegger wrote: post #30
anonytrary wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with a query like that, and I think autocomplete is fine once you typed "muslims are vege...". But I don't see why you'd autocomplete a sentence that could go anywhere. Just because many people type that isn't a good reason.

Why isn't that a good reason?

It's not a search engine's job to be the thought police.

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#34

Post by boffinism »

klohto wrote: post #32

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.

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

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#35

Post by boffinism »

anonytrary wrote: post #16

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 s…

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.

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#37

Post by lake99 »

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.

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#39

Post by pjc50 »

shroom wrote: post #17
avip wrote: post #13

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.

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

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

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#40

Post by lake99 »

shroom wrote: post #17
avip wrote: post #13

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.

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

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.
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