New Search Engine Bing Circumvents Porn Filters
6/2/2009
Everyone wants to be the new Google, even older, established companies like Microsoft. In that vein, today they launched a new search engine called Bing with a focus on trying to not only match, but also improve upon, the legendary Google search engine.
So far, no cause for alarm. Businesses compete with each other and consumers win.
In its bid to out-best the competition, however, Microsoft has added a really nifty and usable feature that has caused a bit of a digital ruckus. Bing allows you to view videos from other sites without all the hassle and page load time associated with actually making you go to the pages that have the videos on them. In fact, all you have to do is hover over one of the videos in your search results and it starts playing right there on the Bing page.
This is a terrific improvement on reducing unnecessary latency in finding what I'm looking for on the Internet. This is simultaneously a terrific way to cripple most commercial and free parental control software packages that are designed to protect your family.
This is because most of these applications rely on blacklisting Internet addresses. So if your middle school aged son does a search for sex on Google, all he gets are search results with some descriptive text and a link pointing to web sites with sexual content. If he then clicks the link to visit the site and see the videos, your web filter will recognize that the link's address is a known sexual content provider and deny access.
With Bing it's different. Your middle school aged son goes to Bing and searches for sex and the first thing that happens is a message comes back saying THE SEARCH SEX MAY RETURN EXPLICIT ADULT CONTENT. To view these videos, turn off safe search. Not only that, but the words safe search are clickable and if clicked, he is given directions on how to turn off Bing's safe search. Two clicks later, a page full of videos is returned. So far, this is not all that different than other search engines. But here is where Bing diverges from the pack. Because of the new feature, your son doesn't actually have to leave the Bing website to watch the videos. And since he is still on Bing, an approved, white-listed website, your parental control filter never has the opportunity to do its job and block the sexual content. Remember, most filters are triggered on the transition from the search engine to the target site. And this part is skipped.
SOLUTION: If you have young kids in your house and you are trying to keep your computer as family-friendly as possible, simply add bing.com to your Internet filter's blacklist. All major free and commercial packages can do this. Call technical support for your product if you do not know how.
To compound the problem, it also came out that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 is forcing Bing to be its default search engine. Hopefully you are using a newer version or a different browser entirely.
It should be noted that Microsoft may address this issue in the near future. They have shown that they are keen to address sexual search concerns based on the sensitivity levels of various cultures. For example, Bing works a little differently in India than here in the U.S.
This new feature isn't bad, but it does have an unfortunate side effect. Im hopeful that it will be addressed by either Microsoft, Internet content filters, or both.
Microsofts New Search Engine Puts Porn in Motion
http://tinyurl.com/npkgtr
IE6 Forcing Bing As Default Search Engine
http://tinyurl.com/o5ayy3
Searches Using 'Sex' Or 'Sexual' Are Taboo on Bing in India
http://tinyurl.com/qmtwyu
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