Microsoft denies intentionally censoring Chinese language searches outside of China

The company has said a technical error is to blame for the omission of results for search terms such as 'Dalai Lama' and 'Liu Xiaobo'

A photo illustration shows the websites of search engines Baidu and Bing on computer screens in Shanghai July 5, 2011 (REUTERS/Carlos Barria )

Microsoft has denied censoring search results deemed politically sensitive to the Chinese government in other countries.

The accusations were made by GreatFire, a freedom of speech advocacy group based in the country. In a statement released on Tuesday the group said that Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was filtering English and Chinese language results for terms such as “Dalai Lama” and “June 4 incident” (the local name for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests).

Charlie Smith of GreatFire said that while conducting search tests in the US he found "radically different results in the US for English and Chinese language”.

Smith and others' research showed that searches in Chinese in the US did not return Western news sources (as the searches in English did) and instead linked to sites such as Baidu Baike, China’s heavily-censored rival to Wikipedia.

Microsoft has responded in a statement, saying that the differences were due to a system fault, but have yet to say whether or not the error has been fixed.

“Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results removal notification for some searches noted in the report but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China," said Stefan Weitz, senior director for Bing, in a statement given to Reuters on Wednesday.

Bing accounts for only a small percentage of search in China but is the second most popular provider in the US, where, as of December 2013, it commands an 18.2 per cent market share to Google’s 67.3 per cent.

If Chinese language searches were censored outside of the US, GreatFire argue that this is tantamount to allowing the Chinese goverment to control their citizens even when they are outside the country.

"This is the kind of story that begets a Congressional hearing," said the group."We are 100% sure our findings indicate that Microsoft is cleansing search results in the US to remove negative news and information about China."

Microsoft is keen to expand its business in China – the biggest single market in the world – and like other tech companies in the country has had to bow to the goverment's strict censorship laws in order to make any headway.