Microsoft Bing Gets Naughty as Porn Theater

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.