6/06/2009

Your kids may get a 'Bang' out of Bing!

Bing, Microsoft's new search engine (www.bing.com), went live in the U.S. this weekend, aiming to challenge and possibly unseat industry titan Google.

But bloggers and Internet safety experts quickly discovered that one of Bing's "features" is that it takes only a few clicks for anyone — of any age — to view explicit pornographic videos without even leaving the search engine.

In its bid to beat Google, Microsoft has unveiled a slate of convenient features for Bing, including an "autoplay" tool that lets users preview videos simply by hovering a mouse over them.

That asset may become a liability, because users can get a taste of porn videos on Bing instead of having to go to a smutty Web site — an innovation other search engines have yet to offer.

This has upset a lot of network administrators who want to block sexual content from being watched in the work place.

In order to fulfill their requirements Bing has been updated with more restrictions options that disable video previews, but as a temporary fix, Microsoft has released a string of code for administrators to enforce the strictest search settings.

A finalized update will be released shortly as Microsoft tackles the issue, but as for now the end user will not be able to search key words related to sexual content such as “porn”, prompting the user with the warning “The search [porn] may return explicit adult content. To view these videos, turn off safe search.”

0 comments: