Microsoft Bing Gets Naughty as Porn Theater
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: microsoft, bing, search, porn | Themes: The Internet
While Microsoft is looking to capture a piece of the search market pie with its recently launched Bing service, the company has taken quite a bit of heat over its "porn theater" aspect.
Internet users who have already tested the "decision" engine's video waters have undoubtedly discovered Bing's ability to instantly play video clips simply by hovering the cursor over the posted thumbnail. The feature is certainly cool to say the least, granting immediate access to music videos, television shows, movies, and even some of the Internet's greatest assets, video porn.
According to InformationWeek, China and certain Muslim countries have already disabled the instant-play function, however Microsoft has pointed out that Bing already features a tool that enables end-users the ability to turn off offensive material. Like Yahoo to some degree, the SafeSearch setting will limit searches based on a pre-set filter: strict, moderate, or off. The strict filter will weed out sexually explicit content at a much greater extent than the moderate filter; the latter could be for those part-time porn lovers while the former strict setting could be used for children and grandpa with a bad heart. With the filter set to off, end-users are greeted with a "wall of porn" rivaling other websites with on-demand naughtiness.
Bing general manager Mike Nichols took notice of the complaints surrounding the engine's erotic results and claims that Bing doesn't return explicit adult video or image results by default; the same holds true with web results. "This is a bit more of a conservative approach than others in the industry," he said in a recent blog. "If you set SafeSearch to strict, you will not see any explicit text, image, or video content. If you turn SafeSearch off, which requires you to change the setting and then click again to acknowledge that you are over 18, then explicit content may appear."
Unfortunately, outside the safe search setting, Bing doesn't offer any sort limitations that could keep children from turning off the filter (as in a required username and password). However, the company is working on a tool for network managers so that SafeSearch can be enforced on a network level, serving as a part of its commitment to offer more control to end-users. Until then, Nichols offered a temporary fix. "So for right now, we wanted to let people know that you can add “&adlt=strict” to the end of a query and no matter what the settings are for that session, it will return results as if safe search was set to strict," he said.
Nichols also added that Microsoft might include additional tools to filter out explicit sexual content later in the future, however the company assures end-users that the current SafeSearch settings are solid. "But at Microsoft we are always working on pushing this stuff farther," he said.
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Okay so don't use bing at work
at least microsoft knows how to pander to it's core constituency...
this is stupid media spin bs. google images does this too but you don't hover the cursor and get an animation. big deal. oh wait, it IS a big deal because MS did it. give me a break...
Commies and those who have too many wives and concubines need to learn the essence of MYOB and stay out of other people's private lives.
this is stupid media spin bs. google images does this too but you don't hover the cursor and get an animation. big deal. oh wait, it IS a big deal because MS did it. give me a break...
eh.. no one cares who else does it or if they do it better... that's not the point of this.. they're merely stating that IT IS POSSIBLE to do it and that their measures to stop it, for 'parents and old people' are token at best.
Commies and those who have too many wives and concubines need to learn the essence of MYOB and stay out of other people's private lives.
wot does that even mean?
non-story. you have to disable the filters to even get the porn content. you can do the same on every other search engine without usernames and passwords. the focus should not be microsoft but the industry as a whole, and particularly google who has the majority of the market.
This is really really shoddy reporting.
Safe searching is enabled by default and you must go to the settings, disable it, and then click that you are over 18 for this to ever be a problem. You can't go to bing.com right now for the first time and get a porn video popping up and whoever wrote this article should have known that before posting this. Not to mention that google doesn't require you to click to verify you are 18.
Beyond that Microsoft isn't the only search engine to return porn results and it is probably MUCH, MUCH better at not returning porn results than the competition. Type in "facial" on bing you get pictures of a spa but go ahead and try to type the same thing into google image search and see what you get.
I can see the headlines now.....
Bing Causing Boners Nationwide!
Type in "facial" on bing you get pictures of a spa but go ahead and try to type the same thing into google image search and see what you get.
this is stupid media spin bs. google images does this too but you don't hover the cursor and get an animation. big deal. oh wait, it IS a big deal because MS did it. give me a break...
This article isn't talking about image search. It's talking about video search. Google's video search does not auto-play videos when you hover over the thumbnail (unless it's some advanced setting that I can't find?).
I can see the headlines now.....Bing Causing Boners Nationwide!
Bing!
people who dont watch porn are the weird ones
As a recovering porn addict, I am now tempted to use bing.
Fuser you missed the point. You can't get to porn unless you are trying to get to porn and went through the steps of disabling the filter in the first place. You can't go to bing.com right now and search for porn and accidentally have a video play because your mouse scrolled over it. No where in this article is this tidbit of information revealed.
True enough, I even searched porn star names like jayden jaymes and came up empty with the settings set to max, hell it even warns you if what you typed will result in explicit content. Searching other names even got me this "The search (insert search here) may return explicit adult content.To view these videos, turn off safe search."
Anyone who complains about this, is a hypocrite, and got what they asked for.....
Not to mention that you have to be searching for that type of content in the first place. Letting your 4 year old kid search for 'Hi5' on Bing isn't going to give them a plethora of adult websites!
WTF ? there are people in this world who don't like porn ??? Then how do they reproduce ? Do those who don't like porn ever get laid ? Those who don't like porn ever realize they are a minority not a majority and others don't give a fuck about their opinion ? Those who don't like porn sure are fagots.
Thanks Microsoft!
You're not the first adult video search, but the simple scroll over to watch with sound included makes it the easiest adult search ever.
Maybe Bing does have potential.
WTF ? there are people in this world who don't like porn ??? Then how do they reproduce ? Do those who don't like porn ever get laid ? Those who don't like porn ever realize they are a minority not a majority and others don't give a fuck about their opinion ? Those who don't like porn sure are fagots.
Ha...
One of my cousins is 100% against porn. Makes up for it by sleeping around a lot...
WTF ? there are people in this world who don't like porn ??? Then how do they reproduce ? Do those who don't like porn ever get laid ? Those who don't like porn ever realize they are a minority not a majority and others don't give a fuck about their opinion ? Those who don't like porn sure are fagots.
Since when does watching porn equate to having sex? Who the hell continues to watch porn (often) if they are having sex? I don't need a video to show me how to do it unless I'm trying to figure out what NOT to do and the easiest way to piss off a woman. There are no links to people watching porn having more sex than people not watching porn and if there was a link I would be almost positive it would show the exact opposite trend.
WTF ? there are people in this world who don't like porn ??? Then how do they reproduce ? Do those who don't like porn ever get laid ? Those who don't like porn ever realize they are a minority not a majority and others don't give a fuck about their opinion ? Those who don't like porn sure are fagots.
Lol, kids are so stupid.
WTF ? there are people in this world who don't like porn ??? Then how do they reproduce ? Do those who don't like porn ever get laid ? Those who don't like porn ever realize they are a minority not a majority and others don't give a fuck about their opinion ? Those who don't like porn sure are fagots.
You're completely off on this. Everyone does love porn, it's just that not everyone wants other people to look at porn.
Of course, that's the case if it's good porn. If you do a search you think will get you good porn, and get a wall of gay porn, well, then, in that case not everyone loves porn. But well done porn? There's a reason it's so popular, and it can't be I'm the only one that likes it. I don't make enough money to keep the entire industry alive.
Lol... is it bad that the first thing I thought when I read this article was: "I wonder how much glee was in Kevin's eyes as he 'reported' on this bit." XD
LOL!
Fuser you missed the point. You can't get to porn unless you are trying to get to porn and went through the steps of disabling the filter in the first place. You can't go to bing.com right now and search for porn and accidentally have a video play because your mouse scrolled over it. No where in this article is this tidbit of information revealed.
I'm not sure what that has to do with my comment. In any case, the article does mention that you can't get porn by default at bing:
"Bing general manager Mike Nichols took notice of the complaints surrounding the engine's erotic results and claims that Bing doesn't return explicit adult video or image results by default; the same holds true with web results."
This article isn't talking about image search. It's talking about video search. Google's video search does not auto-play videos when you hover over the thumbnail (unless it's some advanced setting that I can't find?).
Turn off the default filter in bing and you may get the pictures you were looking foe as well.
This is the only thing about bing that is worth a crap. It would be really cool if the thumbnail got larger when hovered over as well. Come on bing, hook me up. I'm sure that will give you a few more hits a day.
Why are people complaining? This is one of Bings greatest features. The ability to accurately find and watch porn.
That is most likely the big problem with porn there are those that would secretly watch porn but when it comes to being open and admitting that they watch porn they act like they're holy.
Here is one issue many people don't seem to understand. If you work in IT, many companies have strict policies on blocking stuff like porn. You put solutions in place to monitor traffic and block certain sites. Companies have gotten sued (crazy as it sounds) because employees managed to find porn on work computers.
So.... it's up to us to make sure they can't get to it. Bing pretty much works around all of that by caching some of the video content on Microsoft's servers. So when a user does disable their filters (knowingly) and searches for something like "sex scenes" they can watch those little video clips and unless you completely block bing.com (which we do now...) they will be able to play that video. They can't go to the site that contains the full video but they can stream the preview clips returned from the bing searches because they are streaming from bing and not the original site.