At a time when Google is promising to end search censorship in China, a new report has now revealed that Microsoft censors its Bing search engine returns in Arab countries even more heavily than the countries themselves do using national Internet filters. The study covered the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Algeria, and Jordan, and found heavy censorship of anything relating to sex.

"It is interesting that Microsoft's implementation of this type of wholesale social content censorship for the entire "Arabian countries" region is in fact not being practiced by many of the Arab government censors themselves," reads a new report from the Open Net Initiative (ONI), a partnership of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and the SecDev Group, a company in Ottawa. It adds: "It is unclear, however, whether Bing's keyword filtering in the Arab countries is an initiative from Microsoft, or whether any or all of the Arab states have asked Microsoft to comply with local censorship practices or laws."

ONI performed the study by testing the search terms inside the countries. Banned words include "sex," " "intercourse," "breast," "nude," and many more in both the English and Arabic language. The investigators also made a curious discovery: Bing engineers remembered to bar ordinary Arabs from searching for the word "penis" but not for the word "vagina." But they left no stone unturned when it came to blocking words that might lead to sites having to do with homosexuality.

When someone attempts to search most sex-related terms, Bing informs searchers: "Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might contain adult content."

The report comes just two days after a U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill, said during a hearing on Capitol Hill that he'd soon propose legislation imposing civil or even criminal sanctions against Internet companies that don't do enough to support freedom of expression and human rights abroad. The legislation has not yet been filed.

Microsoft just added an interesting new feature to Bing Maps--augmented reality. Actually, it's a bit more like augmented reality in reverse.

A new function, called Streetside Photos, takes real images and video clips and neatly stitches them onto the Bing Map's street-level view, using a clever combination of geolocation information (from a GPS-enabled device, or added manually by the user) and imaging-matching algorithms. This means you can, for example, zoom in on a street and see an image of a particular storefront that was just uploaded to Flickr or Twitpic instead of the standard one. Steetside Photos, which is available for Seattle and San Francisco maps, also includes some nice historical imagery.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, architect of Bing Maps, demoed the feature today at the TED conference, which is taking place in Long Beach and Palm Springs, California.

Agüera y Arcas presented another image-stitching program called Photosynth at TED in 2007. He tells me that the new application's algorithms are similar to Photosynth's but effectively work in reverse. "In Photosynth you start off with a bag of disorganized photos and it finds visual connections," he says. "This is the same; instead of a bag of photos I have one and all of the structured imagery [to attach it to]."

The software behind Streetside Photos can adjust a photo so that it matches to within a few inches, rather than a few feet. This kind of precision is important for augmented reality to work effectively. "The pushpin or the GPS both have quite a bit of inaccuracy," says Arcas. "It's typical for it to be off by 40 meters or more. Some are even more ambiguous."

The user sees a list of photos on the side of the screen and, if she clicks on one, the map view moves to that spot and the photo becomes a bubble overlaying it.

Perhaps most impressively, it can overlay moving video on top of a map, creating a "lens" type of effect, as illustrated in the video at Pike Place Market in Seattle below. While Agüera y Arcas would not say if there will be a Smart phone app to follow Streetside Photos, it seems like a natural progression.

Agüera y Arcas explain the concept in the video below.

Credit: Microsoft

Bing now shows real-time status updates from Twitter.

* Updated at 6:55 PM ET.

In two separate, non-exclusive deals, Microsoft will partner with Facebook and Twitter to show status updates in its search site, Bing. Microsoft officially announced the deals at the Web 2.0 Summit today.

While rumors of the Microsoft-Twitter deal have been circulating for a few weeks, integrating Facebook updates is a surprise twist, although not entirely unexpected, given Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook two years ago. Google is said to be in talks with Twitter and Facebook as well.

*(It didn't take Google long to respond. An official blog post reveals that the company has also signed a deal to index real-time information from Twitter).

Twitter has been gaining notice as a valuable source of real-time information. For example, news often breaks on Twitter before hitting major media outlets and well before showing up in search engines. In January Yahoo announced TweetNews, which ranks Yahoo News stories based on Twitter posts.

The integration seems to be a win-win situation: social networking sites will presumably help search engines capture trending news topics more quickly, while the search engines can offer needed revenue streams to the social networking sites and help solidify their legitimacy. It also makes it harder for businesses to ignore social media: with the integration, having Facebook and Twitter accounts can also help a company gain prominence in the much-coveted top spots on search results.