[Infowarrior] - Can you trust Bing?

[Richard Forno]

Can you trust Bing?
Microsoft's latest tool for marketing
By Nick Farrell
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1496589/can-trust-bing

IT SEEMS THAT Microsoft tinkers with its Bing search algorithms to  
push its own marketing.

According to PC World, if you tap in the phrase "Why is Windows so  
expensive?" you get as a top link "Why are Macs so expensive?"

The rest of the links on the first search page answer everything  
including the price of windows you can see through and little about  
the price of the Windows OS.

There are a few entries about why Windows hosting providers are so  
expensive, and one about fish! The five other links on page one are  
about the expensive price of Macs. The Windows client OS is not even  
mentioned.

If you do the same search at Google, you get a long list of links  
about whether the Windows OS is expensive.

Another search on "Is Microsoft Evil?" gets a top link to a New York  
Times story about whether or not Google is considered evil, a link  
about proxy servers, and a link to a story about Microsoft's charity.

Searches on Bing for the phrase "Is Linux Good?" turn up fairly  
neutral to negative results.

It seems that PC World has a point, in that Bing's search results for  
these phrases are not uncensored.

To be fair to Google, if you type in the phrase "Is Google Evil?" you  
do get a fair few negative posts.

One wonders what Microsoft was smoking when it thought it could get  
away with this. However it appears to have been selective and this  
might even have been an accident. [Uh huh - Ed]

If you type in "Steve Ballmer is Evil" you get the top site being his  
famous monkey boy dance. If you type in "Bill Gates is Evil" you get a  
discussion about whether Bill is, er... evil or not.

Searches on the words "Bill Gates" and "Steve Ballmer" end up at their  
respective Wackypedia pages, so nothing to see here move along please.

Type in "Apple" and you get the fruity religion's Cupertino HQ as the  
number one result with no references to expensive Macs or Chinese  
sweatshops. µ