After China, Search Engines are bowing to the Indian Government and censoring content
Posted on | December 29, 2009 | 7 Comments
After China, it is India’s turn to censor the internet. Bing and Yahoo have started censoring sexually explicit content on the internet. You cannot search for anything that is related to vulgarity. You can’t search for “sex discrimination” because it has the keyword “sex”in it.
Yahoo only censors images while Bing censors even the web results. What’s more – SafeSearch is by default on and cannot be changed. However, the biggest search engine Google has not yet started censoring.
The clampdown is due to recent changes to India’s Information Technology Act of 2000, which bans the publication of pornographic material.
You can bypass this by changing your search location to US or any other western country. That is go to the US version of the search engines.
Other countries’ users can try it out by going to the Indian version of the search engines.
Click on the images to see them maximised.
Update: You can’t search for Porn Actresses’ names or any other thing that would return vulgar images.
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7 Responses to “After China, Search Engines are bowing to the Indian Government and censoring content”
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December 29th, 2009 @ 4:12 pm
Its not Indian govt, just Bing. Don’t give wrong information.
December 29th, 2009 @ 8:59 pm
Why would Bing take such a step without any reason. You can search other “credible” news sites and verify that the Government has indeed changed the law which has forced the search engines to censor results.
December 29th, 2009 @ 9:38 pm
[...] No puedes buscar "discriminacion sexual" en India usando Bing [Eng] techyoyo.com/2009/12/india-sex-censorship-search-engines/ por YoSeQuienSoy hace pocos segundos [...]
December 29th, 2009 @ 10:29 pm
Any time you censor some thing we lose more freedom.
December 30th, 2009 @ 3:00 am
Given that Google have almost as large a market share in India as they do in the UK (http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2008/08/India_Search_Engine_Rankings) I cannot imagine that there is a government decision at play here – possibly this is a move by bing to show that they are a more responsible search provider in order to win the custom of more traditional family users?
December 30th, 2009 @ 3:52 am
Junk Idiots. Looks like it is only Bing and Yahoo acting up.
The Government of India has no problems with people searching for sex discrimination.
What our parliamentarians are worried about is “Sex Determination”, the Pre-Natal Sex Determinination tests where the parents get to know the sex of the unborn child. This test was being abused and it led to female infanticide, so it is banned in India. Google used to allow text ads for search results for the keywords “sex determination” and other similar keywords. The State has a problem with those sponsored content which is illegal and in Indian context, unethical.
December 30th, 2009 @ 4:47 pm
[...] As per this TechYoyo post, it looks like it’s not only Chinese or Australian censorship laws that is in the news. [...]