Bing Gets Porn Domain To Filter Explicit Content

sopssa writes "Bing has set up a separate domain just for porn images and videos. '[The] general manager of Microsoft Bing said in a blog post that potentially explicit images and video content now will be coming from one separate 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.' When Bing was first launched, there was some online chatter about explicit images popping up when videos were 'previewed' in the search results. This means the thumbnails and videos are served from that domain, allowing easy filter of them in corporate and school networks. Users still normally use www.bing.com. Instead of heavily filtering the results, this is quite a good move."

Comments

Re:How does Microsoft define what is 'explicit'?

[l2718]

The easiest way is using the "keywords" META tag which I'm sure is used by most explicit sites to self-identify. The problem of determining the semantic content of a site (not to speak of interpreting images) is hard, but "Safe searches" of various kinds have been around for a long time so I'm sure there's been some progress on the text processing side. I doubt computer vision has reached the stage when it's easy to identify a nude.

Google already came up with a better way

[tumbleweedsi]

Google just make sure they let the filtering people know how to categorise the pages based on if Safesearch is on or off. On my filter I can choose to block google images entirely or just when safesearch is off and that works just fine without needing another domain name.