REDMOND, Wash. — In the wake of criticism over easy-to-watch porn on its new Bing search engine, Microsoft has announced Explicit.Bing.net, a special domain for adult image and video searches.
It didn't take long after Bing's launch for porn fans and the mainstream to discover that the search engine's Smart Motion Preview for videos allowed for watching short clips with the simple roll-over of a mouse.
So now, Microsoft will shuttle off all porn results to the new domain, allowing parents and businesses that want to lock down porn in the office a more definitive filtering option rather the just the settings for Bing's main search engine.
While Microsoft assured users a SafeSearch setting would eliminate porn from search results, even offering up exact coding for IT departments, the uproar over Bing porn didn't quiet down.
In a blog post Friday, Bing General Manager Mike Nichols said, "Microsoft is never done when it comes to providing tools to help customers, whether they are large enterprises, local school districts or parents make sure they can provide a safe searching experience when using Bing."
To that effect the company has put two changes into place: the new adult domain and on the tech side, returning URL source information to a greater extent to help companies improve filtering results.
"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," Nichols said.
"This makes it much easier for filtering software to block unwanted content if SafeSearch has been turned off.”
In regard to returning source URL information via a query string for images and video content, Nichols said this will enable companies that already use this method of filtering "to catch explicit content on Bing along with everything else they are already blocking for their customers."
For more about Bing and its launch, view the AVN.com news archives.
