Bing better get ready for a ding.
Microsoft’s new search engine may run afoul of anti-porn and family-rights organization because it overrides pre-set parental controls and allows for easy viewing of hard-core porn videos by minors.
The software giant said it is aware of the glitch and is working on a solution.
Meanwhile, backed by a $100 million marketing campaign, CEO Steve Ballmer debuted Bing earlier this month and whispers of the easy porn access are already spreading around the Internet.
Bing sidesteps parental controls by running videos from its server, not from the hosted site. So parents won’t even know that their minor children were viewing porn — only that they had been to Bing.com.
Surfers who search for sexually-suggestive words or terms and then opt for video results can start the videos simply by rolling their cursor over the video thumbnails.
Otherwise, a basic test drive of Bing and Google produced fairly similar results — although Bing, with colorful photographs and many menus and options to chose from is certainly a sharper, better-looking product than Google’s stark white page.
Bing is trying to set itself apart from Google in four main areas — travel, health, shopping and local searches. The software giant insists that Bing differs so greatly from Google that it should be called “a decision engine” not a simple “search engine.”
But having done exhaustive searches for vacations, health services, consumer goods and local restaurants, there is really little difference in the quality of search results between Google and Bing.
If you are searching for a Better-looking search engine with lots of extra features to explore, then Bing is the one to go for.
But for ease of use and familiarity, I would stick with Google.