Last week we reported that Microsoft's Bing "decision" engine can track down and play an impressive "wall of porn," displaying actual thumbnail-sized clips of video when end-users place the mouse cursor over the desired clip.
Microsoft has taken quite a bit of heat over this eye-opening feature, even provoking Bing's general manager Mike Nichols to speak out and remind consumers that, hey, Bing filters the naughtiness by default.
But to make sure Bing offers even more control to its users, Microsoft said today that it has implemented two changes that should help keep the explicit material at bay. "First, potentially explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net," said Mike Nichols. He added that this new server will actually be invisible to the end-user, but should allow filtering by domain regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be. In other words, if someone turns off SafeSearch, explicit material can still be filtered via the source domain.
Microsoft will also begin returning source url information in the query string for images and video content. Companies that already use this type of filter can now catch explicit content on Bing along with everything else they are already blocking for their customers. Nichols presented an image and an example url in the blog, however the returned result only pulled up a dog... really.
Unfortunately, Bing doesn't offer hard-core settings to keep resourceful children from unlocking the SafeSearch feature. For now, parents will need to install a 3rd party solution that will monitor things while their kids surf the net. Perhaps Microsoft will devise of a plan soon that will enable the ability to turn SafeSearch off only if users are logged in to a validated MSN account.
