REDMOND, WA — After suffering the slings and arrows of public condemnation for the ease with which it allows users to access explicit pornographic videos, Microsoft has subdivided its new Bing.com search engine into “porn” and “no porn” domains.Explicit.Bing.net, a sub-site of the overall operation, will be used to serve adults-only search results, the company announced. The move is expected to make easier the jobs of people tasked with securing corporate and home networks from the invasion of explicit images and videos.
“Potentially explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate, single domain,” Bing general manager Mike Nichols posted to Microsoft’s Bing blog. “This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain name, which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be.”
SafeSearch is Bing’s onboard filtering tool. It can be configured to block all, some or none of potentially offensive content, but because it works at the behest of the end-user, its settings are subject to change by tech-savvy minors.
Bing went live in the U.S. during the last weekend in May, and almost immediately bloggers and conservative pundits began calling the new search engine the next step in the evolution of pornographic tube sites. One of Bing’s most-touted features is a video search function that allows users to “autoplay” videos simply by hovering a mouse over them.
China demanded the feature be shut off inside its Great Firewall, and some Muslim nations blocked Bing altogether.
“Microsoft is never done when it comes to providing tools to help customers, whether they are large enterprises, local school districts or parents to make sure they can provide a safe searching experience when using Bing,” Nichols wrote on the blog.
