‘Tank Man’ image search showed no results on Bing due to human error, Microsoft claims

Microsoft on Friday said that its search engine Bing yielded no results when users entered the query “tank man” in the United States and elsewhere for part of Friday because of “accidental human error.”

Users in the United States and other countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Singapore, reported that Bing returned the message “There are no results for tank man” when they tried to search the term.

Meanwhile, rival search engine Google, on the other hand, returned many results for the image when the “tank man” query was entered on Friday.

Some social media users raised concerns that Bing, one of the few foreign search engines available in China, may have been censoring the term on the 32nd anniversary of June 4, 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre.