It’s June 4th 32nd anniversary In the notorious Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Chinese troops opened fire on Beijing and massacred hundreds of demonstrators, suppressing the democratic protest movement.
The Chinese government does not like to talk about it, nor does it like others to talk about it.It’s close to Top of a long list of topics The national censor has blacklisted the entire Chinese media and the Internet, Put pressure on companies and other countries Don’t mention the one who does business with China. One of the world-famous photos is of an unknown person in business attire standing on the way from a tank to suppress the protests called “tank man”, which is particularly sensitive.So strangely, on Friday, the search engines Bing, Yahoo Search and DuckDuckGo in the United States searched for the picture but did not return results-this is what Microsoft is eager to achieve. repair.
Throughout Friday afternoon, using the “tank man” image search function on Bing operated by Microsoft returned a message, “Tank man has no results/check spelling or try different keywords.” (According to the motherboard, The same is true in other countries outside the United States, including France and Switzerland. ) Yahoo search powered by Bing returned results, “We did not find the following results: Tank man. Try the suggestions below or enter a new query above. ”The result of DuckDuckGo is returned, simply, “Sorry, no results here.” Reuters senior cyber security reporter Joseph Menn (Joseph Menn) and others cited it as an example of China’s influence on overseas technology companies that do business with Chinese companies.
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This is particularly strange because using the “tank man” general search function (not image-specific) returns a lot of information about all three engines, including thumbnails of photos. Using the more specific “tank man Tiananmen Square” image search function returns a large number of images on Bing and DuckDuckGo; using this query on Yahoo image search will yield more limited 17 results.
Microsoft has done it Business in China For decades, Bing Where you can visit. Like competitors such as Apple, the company has long followed The whimsy of Chinese examiners Maintain the opportunity to enter the country’s huge market, and remove the Bing results in China that the government considers sensitive information. However, the company said that the results of blocking images of “tank man” in the United States were not intentional, and the problem is being resolved.
“This was caused by accidental human error, and we are actively working to solve this problem,” a Microsoft representative The spokesperson told Gizmodo via email.
As of Friday evening, searching for “tank man” on Bing will now return many results-even though this famous photo only appears as a desktop wallpaper and has been heavily modified to cover up the tank.
One possible reason for the “tank man” problem in all three sites is that the smaller search engines lack the scale to index the web itself, so they are licensed from Microsoft for indexing. As of Friday night, the image results of the Yahoo query were the same as the updated version of Bing.
DuckDuckGo is blocked in China, so it seems that there is no motivation for censorship, although it is also related to Yahoo And Bing, the latter License its index fromAs of Friday evening, the results appear to be being updated.
Gizmodo contacted Verizon Media and DuckDuckGo, which owns Yahoo, for comments. If we receive a response, we will update this article.
