DHARAMSHALA: Microsoft’s search engine Bing appears to be censoring information for Chinese language users in the US in the same way it filters results in mainland China, Britain leading daily, The Guardian, reports.

According to searches conducted by anti-censorship campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, it was found that results in Bing’s Chinese-language search engine on sensitive topics such as Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989) and Falun Gong, come with filters. Strangely, users get far more results on same topics in the English language search engine.

When users search for the Dalai Lama in Chinese on Bing, the results show links to information on a documentary compiled by CCTV, China’s state-owned broadcaster and two entries from Baidu Baike, China’s heavily censored Wikipedia rival run by the search engine Baidu. The results are similar on Yahoo, whose search is powered by Bing.

Strangely, running the same search in English on Bing generates a list headed by the Dalai Lama’s own website then links to his Wikipedia page and news reports, including one from Phayul.com, a website run by Tibetans in exile. The English search results page also shows images of the Dalai Lama, unlike the Chinese search.

Google, by contrast, generates broadly similar results for both English and Chinese searches. For Dalai Lama in Chinese it offers two Wikipedia pages as the top results followed by a series of news reports, one from Tibet.

According to CNET, Microsoft has been under fire before for allegedly censoring its content for Chinese users. In 2006, the company admitted to removing the blog of an outspoken Chinese journalist from its MSN Spaces site; and just last year it was alleged that the China-only version of Skype, which Microsoft owns, contained a list of more than 1,100 words used by the Chinese government to censor and monitor users.

Microsoft Corp denied on Wednesday it was omitting websites from its Bing search engine results for users outside China after a Chinese rights group said the US firm was censoring material the government deems politically sensitive, Reuters reported.

Microsoft, responding to the rights group’s allegations, said a system fault had removed some search results for users outside China.