The Security Blog

It is hard to believe that in 2009, in the midst of the multi-billion dollar search-engine wars, a company as large as Microsoft would make such a huge mistake.

Announced in late May 2009, Bing is supposed to be the “Google-killer”, the tool to convert us from “Googling” something to “Binging” it. While on June 3rd, 2009, Bing passed Yahoo! search as the runner up to Google, that lasted about a day… Mostly, I guess, for novelty reasons.

What is the “huge mistake” you ask?

Well, as a part of its service, Bing allows previews of results.  These previews can at times just appear by holding your cursor next to the result.  Also, if you were looking for Videos, you could click on the video tab on the left side.

And guess what? There is some pr0n on the Interwebz!  That’s right, people, there is some actual flesh visible, in motion, to anyone, without leaving the Bing site!

And no… I won’t post a preview here.

Even better (worse) – if you search included the term “video”, sometimes you will get those previews instantly, without needing to peskily click on the Video tab. Presto-pr0n0!  This is almost CERTAIN to bypass many pr0n filters at corporations and homes alike.  Nice going…

So what does a large, respectable company like Microsoft do?  Fix the service? Naaahaa.

Thanks to my The Register friends, I know that Microsoft’s General Manager for Bing (the big bing) suggests the following:

“We think our current search safety settings are solid but at Microsoft we are always working on pushing this stuff farther...” (I read this to mean “later”)

“…So for right now, we wanted to let people know that you can add &adlt=strict to the end of a query and no matter what the settings are for that session, it will return results as if safe search was set to strict. The query would look like this: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=adulttermgoeshere&adlt=strict (yes it is case sensitive).”

So…You read it right, peeps, Microsoft feels you are soooo lucky to be able to use their Bing, that you should be able to type some piece of code in your search. Oh, and the CASE must be right, too. And …Oh… teach that to your kids. And employees. Yeah, that’s easier than for Microsoft to fix that.

I think I will just stick to using Google for now.

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