Our producers at Canada AM have asked me to respond to a story that is quickly spreading across a number of media outlets in the US concerning Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. The gist of the report is that a new preview feature included in the search engine offers greater access to porn, allowing users to watch sexually explicit clips without having to access the porn site hosting them.The parental concern that has quickly been attached to this report is that innocent kids will be more exposed to this material using Bing than with existing search engines. This is absolute hogwash, utter claptrap, moral panic and a poor understanding of the internet run amok. Allow me to clear this up.

The story originates from a couple of bloggers. I’m not sure who posted what first, but the observation that each made is this: If you go into Bing’s preferences menu and turn off its safe search filters, then perform a search using the words “sex” or “porn” into Bing’s video search, you’ll get a grid of thumbnails, each offering a preview of the found video clip. First, let’s establish a few things.

There’s porn on the internet. The ability to freely trade content across the internet has made it a popular destination for pornographic material.

If you type in a search for porn into any search engine, you’ll find this material.

Major search engines include special filters that greatly reduce the chances of this material appearing in innocent searches. If you go to Google for example and click on their preferences link, you’ll find a settings menu where you can turn off these filters or make them stronger. They are set to “moderate” by default.

In addition to performing searches for the web, most search engines include the ability to search for images and videos. With Google, these results are displayed as a grid of thumbnail images, each a preview of the image or video found in the search. The idea being to save you the time of having to visit these sites just to see if it’s what you’re looking for.

If your image or video search is done with the words “sex” or “porn”, these previews will tend to be of a sexually explicit nature.

This isn’t new.

I’m going to assume that the bloggers who started this tale were trying to perform a test of Bing’s ability to handle explicit material as compared to other search engines. If that were the case, they should have left the Safe Search Filters turned on, that would be the technology suited for testing not the search engine itself, and they should have used more innocuous search terms like “pussywillow”, one that a student might actually use in doing their homework and that could return results of both an innocent or sexually explicit nature.

Here’s the steps that were taken to create this story.

The bloggers visited Bing.com.

They clicked on the “Extras” option on the upper right and selected the preferences menu.

They turned off the Safe Search Filters.

A warning prompt appeared reminding them of the greater exposure and asking them to confirm that they are over 18 years old. They clicked yes.

They then performed a search using the word “sex” or “porn” into the Video Search option.

Bing’s video thumbnails are slightly different from other search engines in that they are animated, showing the first few seconds of the clip. This is a feature that has been carried over from Windows Live Search, nothing new.

The concern that has been raised is that this primitive animation equates to getting the targeted sexually explicit clip without having to actually access it. In truth, you’re getting a snippet and a primitive one at that, and only after taking specific steps to search for it.

Will this increase the chances that your children will trip across sexually explicit content while using Bing? No, absolutely not.