
Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine - basicplus2
https://www.howtogeek.com/367878/bing-is-suggesting-the-worst-things-you-can-imagine/
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anonytrary
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
searching things. I would much rather know what people search for than have
Google treat me like I'm their child with their hands covering my eyes during
the dirty scenes.

~~~
jakobegger
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 ...".

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gear54rus
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 :)

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ubernostrum
_some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn 't see_

Yes, that's what a suggestion algorithm is.

There is no pure Platonic ideal neutral objective suggestion algorithm. Every
suggestion algorithm is going to have biases based on both its training data
and the goals (explicit or otherwise) of its creators.

You've gotten as far as, apparently, noticing that tweaking the algorithm
after the public has seen it constitutes a choice on the part of the designers
about what they do and don't want to show you. Now take the final logical
step, and observe that they already made choices about what they do and don't
want to show you in the initial design, before the algorithm ever went public.

If you have a problem with the former, I don't see how you can be logically
consistent while _not_ having a problem with the latter.

~~~
gear54rus
when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for, not
"what people search for, except...", this talk about suggestion algos has
nothing to do with the issue I think

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dragonwriter
> when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for

That's never been the point, though it's sometimes been an implementation
method because it's easy: the point is to provide a useful guess of what you
might be searching for.

Some search engines do provide tools for exploring patterns of other people's
searches, but recommendation systems have never been that except as a matter
of leaky implementation details.

~~~
gear54rus
it was just an example, you can choose another if you think it's more
appropriate, my point is that this idiotic censorship has no place in search

if it has something to show me regarding my search (and it certainly does), it
must

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Nasrudith
Personally I find that brutal honesty about its search suggestions refreshing
as opposed to manually excluding anything remotely controversial. Although the
reality is probably that somebody is spoofing the search suggestions for
laughs above and beyond morbid curiosity and jokes of debatable taste akin to
searching for nuclear warheads on eBay.

~~~
sam_goody
The issue is that once these thoughts and articles are suggested, they become
much more mainstream.

Try something less controversial, robbery. No doubt, people search for "how to
break into houses", and you might even click on that link if it was a top
suggestion. But if people saw that all the time, there would be an increase in
robberies, and a decrease in the feeling that it matters.

And just because it generates traffic, doesn't mean it is what most people are
really looking for!

It just means that it has appeal because of the way we are wired to respond to
things that are outrageous. Once it is a suggestion (even at the end of the
list) it will get clicks, and move up till it dominates.

~~~
jstanley
> Once it is a suggestion (even at the end of the list) it will get clicks,
> and move up till it dominates.

So why isn't every article that has ever been suggested moving up until it
dominates?

~~~
sam_goody
Because most articles don't trigger the same responses.

It is the outrageuos and the radical that trigger the interest.

Have you not noticed that the links on the side of all the trash blogs are
full of "The craziest snake!" or whatever?

Which clickbait works better - "Hitler loved his black maid" or "cheap
diapers"? Does that really mean that more people are searching for Hitler's
black maid than for cheap diapers?

~~~
jstanley
So in your opinion why isn't "Hitler loved his black maid" the top result for
every search query?

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puranjay
This article assumes that Bing is in the business of telling people what to
think

It's not; it's in the business of _showing_ what people think

~~~
pjc50
No, a search engine literally tells you what to look at, based on what you
told it. And for many people there's a short path between seeing and
believing.

The autocomplete suggestions are a suggestion: would you like to search for
this? And in the minds of many people that normalises it.

"Stochastic terrorism" is a real problem. You've got one guy mailing out bombs
and another shooting up a synagogue based on lies they read on the internet,
just this past week. This stuff has consequences.

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s9w
This article is straight up asking for censorship. Nothing else.

~~~
83457
Correct. They are literally asking that the censorship feature to work as
expected.

~~~
s9w
SafeSearch definition says: "filter out adult text, images, and videos". It's
not about racism. So it's working as expected

~~~
jonchang
Did you read further along? There's also suggestions for bestiality and
borderline child pornography, both of which definitely fall under adult images
and in one or both cases are very illegal.

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true_religion
You said borderline, because it is not past the line of illegality.

Thus your second sentence makes no sense.

~~~
yorwba
Borderline but legal child pornography would still be classified as "adult",
no? To me, the second sentence makes perfect sense.

~~~
true_religion
If you have safe search on, all the results should be non nude, non adult.

I reread the article, and see where I went wrong. They mix up two issues: bing
returning odd suggestions with safe search on, and bing returning results for
searches for illegal material with safe search off.

I had thought they were only talking about safe search being on.

In my misreading, I made the assumption that Bing would never return illegal
results for searches for children, as it would never return pornography since
safe search is on. Apologies to the OP.

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klohto
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.

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

~~~
pembrook
So the slippery slope here is: if you're 12 and see an algorithm autocomplete
"muslims are [insert racist thing]," its going turn you into a racist by
suggestion?

The reason autocomplete results end up this way is because _the humans this
kid lives around are racists._ Those people will be the reason the kid grows
up racist, not some 2nd tier search engine. Why lie to the kid and pretend
like the community he/she lives in doesn't have a problem?

I've never understood this bizarre desire we have to hide reality from
children to keep them ignorant (or more commonly referred to as "innocent").
As if they can't observe the objective reality around them. The sooner they
can understand the problems with the world the sooner their generation can
work toward fixing them.

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vidanay
I once did a search on Bing for a .NET topic and Bing didn't even return any
Microsoft documentation results.

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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.

~~~
pjc50
Not so much autocomplete suggestions, but the autosuggested related searches
under Image Search.

In my case I got shown "muslims are scum" and "muslims are terrorists", in the
UK. "Michelle Obama" got suggested "... muscles"?

~~~
lake99
No, I had looked at those too. Both under Image Search (for Jews, Muslims, and
"gril") and under Videos (for Michelle Obama). All the related searches were
completely innocuous. The autocomplete suggestions were the least innocuous
ones I got. Looking for "gril" got me images of girls, but all completely SFW
or child-safe.

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avip
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.

~~~
shroom
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country)

~~~
pjc50
It would have been a lot higher if six million hadn't been murdered.

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mosselman
Not the main point of the article, so off topic, but isn’t “underage children”
a pleonasm? Or is it a term that respects that we are all someone’s child, so
also when we reach adulthood?

The term seems to suggest there is an age from which it is acceptable for
children to receive sexual attention from adults. I prefer to think that there
is no such age. Most people would probably agree with this.

Pleonasms are very common; “your personal belongings” is a funny one. In the
case of ‘underage children’ though, it undermines the message.

~~~
yorwba
> Most people would probably agree with this.

I think you might be overestimating how common your opinion is. In many (maybe
most) countries, children are considered capable of consent even before they
are granted all privileges of adulthood. Sometimes it's only if the partner is
underage as well, but then one will be an adult sooner than the other, so
there are exceptions for cases where the age difference is small.

Because of the various exceptions in traditional consent law in contrast to
bright-line rules against child pornography (below 18 is illegal, no
exceptions), it's possible for legal sex to become illegal as soon as there's
a camera between the participants.

The best-known cases are probably of teens being prosecuted for child
pornography when they take nude selfies.

~~~
mosselman
What you say is true for interpersonal relationships. The article is about
imagery with an erotic element. So in the context of erotic photography I
think that most countries would consider participation of children illegal and
I think most people would agree with that.

So I'd think that in the context of the article it could be a pleonasm, but an
understandable one then.

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sgt101
It doesn't suggest those things for me - did they fix it or is this a case of
personalisation?

~~~
pjgrad
As the article states, Microsoft took note of it and started correcting some
of the suggestions.

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scoot_718
Sure, but google image search gives spam results from Pinterest, so Bing still
wins.

