Bing tries to be porn-free by offering filtering

After receiving widespread criticism over how easy it was for children to find porn on Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, the company said it has made changes that allow parents to monitor or block what their children see on their site.

Explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain, which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be, the company said in a blog post.

Almost all third-party filtering tools can be configured to block specific domains or sites, as can the parental controls in Microsoft Vista and Mac OS X.

The software giant explained that the new features will also return the source URL information of specific images and videos, so if a filtering program blocks that site, it will prevent the video or image from being viewed within Bing.

Bing began to receive criticism after users began to complain that it was so easy to watch porn on its site by just hovering the mouse over its thumbnail within a Bing search.