Different default safe-search settings per region makes total sense as moral sensibilities vary significantly (for example, in parts of Europe, nudity is commonly used in normal advertising, which wouldn't fly in the US), however, what seems offensive with this is that it seems you are not allowed to switch safe search off.

I wonder if disabling such is as simple as switching the region setting or if it's region coded when accessed from those countries.

What content is censored in USA and other "free" countries?

I mean, it's not that we just get the full firehose here, and other countries are variously prudish. In America we do filter things especially for child porn, and also for various other illegal topics (especially intellectual property).

Before you jump on me and say that we're just protecting children (or whoever the victims of other censored crimes are), please consider how well the actual legalities map to actual objective harms, or even to community-accepted morals.

I assert that we're still subject to a non-trivial degree of censorship in America, and the boundaries of that censorship map very poorly to an objective harms, and only approximately to any morality that's pervasive through our culture.

So any argument against filtering for the laws and culture in other parts of the world can't just be "censorship is wrong", because then you indict our own rules as well. It's a much more complex question.

In all these countries as soon as you try to connect to a website where nudity or other banned content is displayed the mighty filter will divert you to a screen telling you that the website displays prohibited material - Bing settings or no Bing settings. The actual search engine you use is immaterial and this is just a gimmick by Microsoft. Most people find this very annoying and would use https vtunnel or something similar :)

disclosure : Currently in Qatar

True.

I live in Lebanon, and we have no such filter. It is the most liberal of Arab nations(some even say it isn't an Arab nation). Nudity in media is frowned upon, but we have a crazy night life that even I think is extreme sometimes. Go figure...

Anyway, for the people it matters to, they quickly learn how to avoid such filters. Otherwise, you can get whatever you want from the bittorrent trackers which aren't banned.

I couldn't agree more. Lebanon, specially Beirut, is utterly sleazy and one vacation I will happily take back. There isn't much "organic" nightlife there; if you want to rub shoulders with juiced up muscle heads and trafficked prostitutes, Beirut is the place to be. For casual middle-eastern night life you're probably better off in Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, or Amman.

And in that environment, it makes perfect sense to filter that content out of your search results. If you don't, your users will get big no-no screens all the time, and you run the risk of getting banned yourself.

This really doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

What google leaves on the table due to principles, a marketshare-only oriented competitor will definitely jump at. What's best in the long term remains to be seen. While I personally prefer companies with a personality because it gives me a feeling of a longer term vision, it could be considered condescending to enforce your morals on a market that in majority is averse to specific content.

How is it condescending to choose to not censor content? If someone is averse to specific content, then they shouldn't search for it. Easy as that. They're able to make decisions for themselves.

Good point that markets and long term vision are valuable assets in a company, and that the simple idea that one's moral impositions should be considered. However, I'll contend that human rights are about a whole lot more than just morals.

Shouldn't come as a surprise really. Most Arab nations oppress expressions of sexuality, and freedom of speech as a basic right is nonexistent.

Can't you have multiple wives in some Arab nations?

How is this related to the above comment?

Actually it does not matter if Bing filters the content or not. All (almost) of users' traffic goes through a ISP's proxy server. They have semi-intelligent method to filter the content. At least it used to work like this 5 years back.

Sure times have changed but I assume they are still using same/similar methods to filter. As kids, we coded our proxy servers running on servers like Geocities using open-source perl scripts but they ended up blocking it every now and then. Times have changed, they still maintain their ........

What did anyone expect from "Bing"? They claim to be a "decision engine", and at least in the commercials I've seen, they don't say that the users get to make the decisions.

Disclaimer: I've only used "Bing" twice myself.