Microsoft has made some readjustments to its newly-launched Bing search engine so that it would filter out all adult images and videos from Bing search results. Now, adult content will be served from a separate domain – explicit.bing.net. This is Microsoft’s attempt to allow better filtering of content by domain making it easier for organizations to filter explicit images out of search results.
Bing’s Smart MotionPreviews lately created a lot of noise and controversy. By simply mouse hovering over the video thumbnails, anyone gets easy access to adult content without actually having to go to a pornographic site.
Mike Nichols, General Manager, Bing writes in a blog post:
“Potentially explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be. This makes it much easier for filtering software to block unwanted content if SafeSearch has been turned off.”
In addition to this, Nichols also mentioned that Bing will return source url information in the query string for image/ video content so that companies who already use this method of filtering can catch explicit content on Bing along with everything else they are already blocking for their customers.
Microsoft does not seem to be censoring anything, just categorizing it differently, giving customers the option to either view it, or not, by simple filtering. Share your comments on what you think about this.
(Source: Bing blog)