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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 16 2018, @01:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the NSFW-NSFW-NSFW-NSFW-NSFW-NSFW dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

If you use Bing’s image search, you’re going to see the worst filth you can imagine.  Bing suggests racist terms and shows horrifying images. Bing will even suggest you search for exploited children if you have SafeSearch disabled.

We contacted Microsoft for comment, and Jeff Jones, Senior Director at Microsoft, gave us the following statement:

“We take matters of offensive content very seriously and continue to enhance our systems to identify and prevent such content from appearing as a suggested search. As soon as we become aware of an issue, we take action to address it.”

Update: Since publication, Microsoft has been working on cleaning up the offensive Bing suggestions that we mentioned. Based on our research, there are still many other offensive suggestions that have not yet been fixed, including a few that we’ve mentioned below. We are unsure if they are simply fixing the offensive items we pointed out, or if they are improving the algorithm.

Note: The screenshots here show what we saw when we wrote this piece testing the US version of Bing Image search in an Incognito private browsing session, but Bing’s results shift over time. Google didn’t have any of these problems, according to our tests. This is a Bing problem, not just a search engine problem. The same problem affects Bing’s video search.

[...] Microsoft needs to moderate Bing better. Microsoft has previously created platforms, unleashed them on the world, and ignored them while they turned bad

We’ve seen this happen over and over. Microsoft once unleashed a chatbot named Tay on Twitter. This chatbot quickly turned into a Nazi and declared “Hitler was right I hate the jews” after it learned from other social media users. Microsoft had to pull it offline.

[...] Microsoft can’t just turn a platform loose on the world and ignore it. Companies like Microsoft and Google have a responsibility to moderate their platforms and keep the horror at bay.

Suggestions Have a History of Serious Problems

Of course, there’s no team of people at Microsoft choosing these suggestions. Bing automatically suggests searches based on other people’s searches. That means many Bing Images users are searching for antisemitism, racism, child pornography, and bestiality.

Please refer to TFA for actual search terms, suggested items, and images found.

Also at The Verge, BBC News


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:43PM (8 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:43PM (#749545) Journal

    Agreed. I still use Google, because they are apparently the masters of search. But, before I resort to Google, I use the duck, and yandex. The only times I have ever used either Bing or Yahoo, was after installing a browser which used them by default. It only takes one search, and I'm changing the default search engine within a minute or so.

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:37PM (4 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:37PM (#749582) Journal

    I still use Google [sometimes, but] before I resort to Google, I use the duck, and yandex.

    It is scary sometimes when I run across ways that we are frighteningly alike, regardless of the ways in which we differ.

    Before I decided not to give google all my data, google trained me to expect search results to be fast, effective, and right on the first try.

    With Duck Duck Go [duckduckgo.com] as my default search in Waterfox (privacy-respective fork of Firefox, as Iridium is a privacy-respecting fork of Chromium), things usually work magically as expected. But sometimes a search returns nothing useful, and I experience a few moments of puzzlement before saying "oh, yeah" and trying google.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:59PM (2 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:59PM (#749599) Journal

      It is likely that we have similar training, from similar sources - or exactly the same source. We have learned over the years how to shape and frame a search in Google that will give us the sort of results we expect. Using another search engine, the same "tricks" don't work exactly the same. So, we expend the effort to rephrase a search a couple times, then give up, and return to the same-old same-old, where our years-long training pays off.

      • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday October 16 2018, @07:11PM (1 child)

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 16 2018, @07:11PM (#749642) Journal

        where our years-long training pays off.

        I harbored a simmering resentment for years after mastering Excite!'s advanced search syntax to find exactly what I want, every time, only to have them disappear into the ghost of Internet past.

        I quite prefer crafting the details of what I do want, rather than a search engine (*cough*google*cough*) that just broadly guesses that since my very specific terms searching for something in particular didn't return many hits, surely I must want results for some pop culture thing that millions of other people searched for instead.

        Want results about debian stretch? There's more results for stretchy toys missing debian!

        I didn't find much about Spear of Destiny, but, hey, here's some fan sites about Britney Spears!

        Etc. Okay, I guess I still harbor some of that resentment, more than I really realized.

        • (Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Wednesday October 17 2018, @02:09AM

          by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 17 2018, @02:09AM (#749773) Journal

          Altavista. Misty moons ago, it strode the internet like a messiah.

          --
          В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday October 17 2018, @02:33AM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday October 17 2018, @02:33AM (#749784) Journal

      Eh, I'm also a DDG and alternate-browser user (Falkon, since there's no working Iridium PKGBUILD in the aur yet...). Correct is correct, regardless of the opinions of the people being correct. That's the difference between fact and opinion.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @05:16PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @05:16PM (#749602)

    you could use startpage instead of resorting to google, which uses google search results but proxies out the spying, ostensibly.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:17PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:17PM (#749628)

      Searx is nice. I run a local instance on my laptop.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @12:17AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @12:17AM (#749716)

        thanks, hadn't heard of that one.