Google Censoring Its Own Results?

A friend sent me a link to the article by Lawrence Solomon titled "Better off with Bing" (1/16/2010 FP Comment). The article is about Google's own censoring of certain topics for the worldwide users, which many call "Googlegate", and Mr. Solomon uses "climategate " as an example. He contends that Bing, Microsoft's search engine, returns 'uncensored' results as opposed to Google.

That got me curious, so I searched "climategate" on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Here's the result tonight:

Number of search results:

Google: 1,680,000
Yahoo: 22,600,000
Bing: 57,200,000

The site that comes up at the top:

Google: Climatic Research Unit hacking incident - wikipedia
Yahoo: Climategate| Anthoropogenic Global Warming, history's scam
Bing: (same as Yahoo's)

By the way, if you google "googlegate", the search returns 29,700. If you use Bing, the search returns 82,700,000. So for Microsoft, "googlegate" is a far bigger deal than "climategate". (That's so Steve Ballmer.)

I don't normally use Bing, so I am not familiar with its quirkiness if any. But I have suffered through Microsoft's products over the long years, and I don't want to use anything coming out of that company if I have an alternative. And "google" is a verb now, while "bing" isn't.

And I would still say "Good for Google for defying the Chinese authorities on censoring."

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