Connecting to porn sites becomes easier with Bing

Bangalore: Days after Microsoft launched the new search engine 'Bing' to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo, Internet safety experts have warned that that there is a glitch in the engine that gives users easy access to pornographic material.

As it went live in the U.S. this weekend, a technology blogger Loic Le Meur on June 1 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. Meur found that the number of pornography located transformed the search engine into its very own pornographic website. Loic writes in his blog, "You are now on a porn site without leaving Bing."

To unseat Google from top, Microsoft had unveiled a slate of convenient features including an "autoplay" tool that may enable users to preview porn videos without logging into the respective websites.

After this incidence, online safety advocates argued search engines to do much more to cut off underage access to pornography. As number of children using internet has grown by double in last one year across the world.

Content-filtering companies have been reviewing Bing, and have found the same problems. Forrest Collier, CEO, InternetSafety.com said, "Bing.com at this point allows users to watch pornographic videos without ever leaving the site." Parental filtering software, such as SafeEyes, which is produced by Collier's company, can block any explicit or unwanted search results,� he added.

Microsoft released a statement saying that it was up to users to turn off the filters, instructions have been provided to toggle the settings. "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.