Thought Microsoft's new search engine 'Bing' may be as good as Google, Internet safety experts have warned that there is a glitch in the engine that gives users easy access to porn material.
Bing went live in the U.S. this weekend, and bloggers and Internet safety experts discovered that one of its "features" needed only a few clicks for anyone, of any age, to view explicit pornographic videos without even leaving the search engine.
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The tool may become a liability because users can have easy access to porn videos on Bing, and not have to log on to one of the porno web sites.
The glitch was noticed by technology blogger Loic Le Meur on June 1 after testing video search on Bing, and he found the number of pornography located transformed the search engine into its very own pornographic Web site.
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Bing, like other major search engines, lets users set filtering preferences at one of three levels-strict, moderate or simply off.
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"It's a no-brainer for any kid," said Donna Rice Hughes, president and chairwoman of Enough Is Enough, a group that works to help parents protect children from online porn.
"From the standpoint of the new state-of-the-art search engine, [the video preview] is a really neat thing of course.
"The flipside of that is that you've got an abundance of pornography out there," she added.
Content-filtering companies have also been reviewing Bing, and have found the same gaping problems.
"Bing.com does at this point allow users to watch pornographic videos without ever leaving the site," Forrest Collier, CEO of InternetSafety.com, said.
He said that parental filtering software, such as SafeEyes, which is produced by Collier's company, can block any explicit or unwanted search results.
Microsoft said in a statement that it was up to users to turn off the filters, and provided instructions on how to toggle the settings on its blog.
"By default, Bing filters out explicit image and video results. Consumers must take action to turn off the Safe Search filter in their settings in order for explicit image or video content to appear in Bing's results," the statement read.
Other major search engines like Yahoo and Google come up with similar video and image results when electronic filters are turned off, but they don't provide automatic playing of videos within the search-results page.
Source-ANI
ARU
