Bing and Internet Censorship
So.... my personal opinion is that Microsoft sucks and will always suck, but I've been reading a lot of news articles about Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, just because I can.
I'm troubled, now, because the biggest issue of debate about Bing has been the search filters. People got upset because of explicit search results (like you don't get them on Google). So Microsoft fixed users' ability to filter their searches and turn off explicit content etc. That's fine - if you don't want explicit results, that's cool. You should be able to filter them out.
But all this gets people talking about explicit content on the internet in general, and maybe it should be separated from regular stuff with its own domain (.xxx - yeah, for serious), and why's it even there to begin with. And soon it starts sounding a LOT like censorship. And that bothers me. a lot. The internet should not be censored. Because then what's the point? What makes the internet awesome is the freedom it provides. And I'd like to keep it that way. Nobody but me should get to decide what I find offensive, and I hope very much that other people - particularly Microsoft and Google - remember that.
I'm troubled, now, because the biggest issue of debate about Bing has been the search filters. People got upset because of explicit search results (like you don't get them on Google). So Microsoft fixed users' ability to filter their searches and turn off explicit content etc. That's fine - if you don't want explicit results, that's cool. You should be able to filter them out.
But all this gets people talking about explicit content on the internet in general, and maybe it should be separated from regular stuff with its own domain (.xxx - yeah, for serious), and why's it even there to begin with. And soon it starts sounding a LOT like censorship. And that bothers me. a lot. The internet should not be censored. Because then what's the point? What makes the internet awesome is the freedom it provides. And I'd like to keep it that way. Nobody but me should get to decide what I find offensive, and I hope very much that other people - particularly Microsoft and Google - remember that.