Bing Offers New Gateway to Porn
Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is now live, and getting mixed reviews, precisely because it does everything so well.
Microsoft admits freely that Bing is a fairly simple modification of its Live Search, with a more intuitive user interface and helpful features like getting airfare rates right on the results page, quick answers to common questions (though this works about as well as other search engines, meaning not at all), and helpful preview information.
The reason Bing is making news this week is for doing something a little too well, specifically looking for porn. Users can quickly get around the Bing safe search (it took me about 1.5 seconds on my first visit to the site, after one failed search and two easy clicks), and once that is off, it’s completely unrestricted access to images and videos. While google and other search engines have similar capabilities, and allow users to view video on the search without visiting the site, Bing’s search technology eliminates spoofs on pornography, videos dealing with pornography issues, and the like.
A video search for porn on google returned about 50% non-pornographic videos, whereas in Bing the match was 100%, and more results are displayed per page in the default settings. Furthermore, if the user mouses over Bing video search results the video will start playing without being clicked, which means that anyone accidentally encountering porn could easily start playing the video without meaning to.
Our Safe Eyes software blocks all pornographic content on Bing and google searches out of the box, but parents without filters on their computers need to add one more site to their personal watchlist. Bing’s built in filters would be a breeze for a child of any level of computer-savvy to bypass instantly, and once on, the user never needs to leave bing.com to access unlimited hours of pornographic video.
Filed under: Internet Safety News
[...] all pornographic content on Bing and Google searches out of the box,” according to a post on its company blog. From my perch in the sky, I wasn’t able to check with other filtering [...]
And why is this a huge issue? Google videos would be just as easy to access for a child of any level of computer-savvy, and even google has videos embedded from other sites. And please, do you think it was tough for computer-savvy children to access porn before bing?
Bing (the commenter) those are all valid points. It’s simply a difference of degrees really, and all we wanted to do was inform parents who are manually monitoring their kid’s Internet use that there is a new site to watch out for. Also, Microsoft has at least acknowledged the problem and is working towards a fix:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10257397-2.html
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Microsoft Bing would be the closest competitor of Google. but i still use Google because it shows more relevant search results on the serp.
i have been evaluating the search results of Microsoft Bing compared to Google and they are comparable. Bing gives almost the same relevant search results just like Google.
i have been using the BING search engine for a couple of weeks. it seems to be as good as Google but for some reason i would still want to stick with Google search engine –