Bing
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Adult content Video content Bing's video search tool has a preview mode that could potentially be used to preview pornographic videos.[65] By simply turning off safe search, users can search for and view pornographic videos by hovering the cursor over a thumbnail, since the video and audio, in some cases, are cached on Microsoft's Server. Since the videos are playing within Bing instead of the site where they are hosted, the videos are not necessarily blocked by parental control filters. Monitoring programs designed to tell parents what sites their children have visited are likely to simply report "Bing.com" instead of the site that actually hosts the video. The same situation can be said about corporate filters, many of which have been fooled by this feature.[66] Users do not need to leave Bing's site to view these videos.[67] [68] Microsoft responded in a blog post on June 4, 2009, with a short term work-around.[69] By adding “&adlt=strict” to the end of a query, no matter what the settings are for that session it will return results as if safe search were set to strict. The query would look like this: http:/ / www. bing. com/ videos/ search?q=adulttermgoeshere& adlt=strict (case sensitive). On June 12, 2009, Microsoft announced two changes regarding Bing's Smart Motion Preview and SafeSearch features. All potentially explicit content will be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. Additionally, Bing will also return source URL information in the query string for image and video contents. Both changes allow both home users and corporate users to filter content by domain regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be.[70]
Regional censorship Bing censors results for adult search terms for some of the regions including India, People's Republic of China, Germany and Arab countries.[71] This censoring is done based on the local laws of those countries.[72] However, Bing allows users to simply change their country/region preference to somewhere without restrictions – such as the United States, United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland – to sidestep this censorship.
Criticism Censorship Microsoft has been criticized for censoring Bing search results to queries made in simplified Chinese characters, used in mainland China. This is done to comply with the censorship requirements of the government in China.[73] Microsoft has not indicated a willingness to stop censoring search results in simplified Chinese characters in the wake of Google's decision to do so.[74] Searches in Bing are censored all over the world, not just China, when the search query is made in simplified Chinese characters.[75]
Performance issues Bing has been criticized for being slower to index websites than Google search or Yahoo! search. It has also been criticized for not indexing some websites at all.[76] [77] [78]
Ranking practices Bing has been criticized by competitor Google, for utilizing user input via Internet Explorer, the Bing Toolbar, or Suggested Sites, to add results to Bing. After discovering in October 2010 that Bing appeared to be imitating Google's auto-correct results for a misspelling, despite not actually fixing the spelling of the term, Google set up a honeypot, configuring the Google search engine to return specific unrelated results for 100 nonsensical queries such