Some days ago I was searching for the web address of a German publishing house called "Otto Bauer Verlag" on my Samsung Omnia 7 with Bing. Despite both Otto and Bauer being rather common German names, Bing on Windows Phone 7 returned not one single result for the search term "Otto Bauer" while the desktop version of Bing reported a whopping 9 million hits. Among those hits, as I became aware, one of the most prominent is a link to a Wikipedia page concerned with the life and times of a certain individual named Otto Bauer who obviously made a reputation by starring in adult movies.
With growing suspicion I tried other lewd search terms like "sex", "penis", and the despicable "intercourse", each time ending up with identical results as for the illustrious Mr. Otto Bauer - none. It appears that Bing on Windows Phone 7, at least under German T-Mobile branding, imposes the safety filters of Bing.net upon its search results. These filters do not just wipe links to explicit content from search results but block entire search terms, like said "Otto Bauer".
Such a behavior may be desirable for many, but only if one were provided with the option to disable it, which is not the case on Windows Phone 7. Hence, Bing won't let me browse to the evangelical publishing house Otto Bauer due to some enterprising and eponymous adult actor. There is a fine line between cover and confinement.
Two side notes that keep me wondering even more. First, I haven't yet found any mention of the safe search restriction anywhere on the web. So either Windows Phone users are a remarkable squad of puritans or nobody just uses Bing. And second, Microsoft seems to reckon men's primary sexual characteristcs nastier than those of women: "penis" boasts no hits, "vagina" brings up a most colourful assortment of results.
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