Microsoft's Porn Search Blocked in Islamic Countries

Most of the world — especially Islamic and Chinese countries — isn't getting the real Bing.

As reported last week, searching for "sex" or "porn" in Microsoft's new search engine returned dozens of explicit images and videos, as long as the user turns "safe search" off.

Thanks to Bing's autoplay feature, dragging the mouse over a video thumbnail starts playing it immediately — meaning that you can watch hours of hardcore sex without even leaving the Bing Web site (or paying for porn).

But it turns out that that only works if you say you're an English-speaking American, Canadian or Australian.

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For the rest of the world, it's different. Users in most countries get raunchy images, but not videos.

And a for a dozen or so countries, searching for "sex" or "porn" gets you nothing at all, not even Web links.

Predictably, that list includes most of the Islamic world, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and what Microsoft calls "Arabian" countries.

It also includes India, where the "ban" is causing quite a stir on local blogs, as well as China and Chinese-predominant Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, plus Korea and Thailand.

"We determined the list of countries for which sexually explicit results are restricted based on analysis of where such are restricted by local law, but we did not take these actions in response to specific government demands or regulations," a Microsoft spokesman told the Indian Web site ContentSutra.com.

For some reason, Germany's also on the "banned" list — strange, considering that underage porn magazines that would be illegal in the U.S. are sold in every German big-city train station.

Google, in contrast, doesn't filter by language. Changing the preferred language to Chinese or Arabic gets you the same hardcore images as searching in English (though video results in any language are less hardcore than Bing).

The British, French, Japanese and Russians do get the video nasties in Bing, but the search results are tweaked so that the raunchier stuff gets pushed further down the page by "safer" clips.

The rest of Europe, plus Latin America, New Zealand and South Africa, get hardcore images, but no videos of any sort, no matter what you search for. So, inexplicably, do Americans who choose Spanish as their primary language, and French-speaking Canadians.

That might be due to complicated video- and music-copyright laws, which vary from country to country and can be very difficult to sort out. After all, it's hard to imagine the Swedes, Danes or Dutch — or French Canadians — objecting to porn clips.

In any case, as Indians looking for porn images on Bing quickly found out, all it takes is a change on the country-localizing page to see the good, or bad, stuff.

All they have to do is declare themselves a resident of "Australia," "Canada (English)" or "United States (English)," and they'll be getting the full Bing.