Bing vs. Google face-off, round 4

Public awareness of the nature of breast cancer is the greatest tool we have for saving the lives of women. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation is a magnificent organization that has already worked wonders in planting a better understanding of this disease in the public consciousness, as well as eliminating the taboos that prevent intelligent folks from discussing it publicly.

So suppose your child is given a school research project on breast cancer. The best way to understand how to perform a self-exam is through a video, and you can't exactly show a video of an exam without showing something that either is, or looks very much like, a breast. Thus, the query for our next test is breast cancer examination.

This is where it's apparent that human beings may very well have sensibly tweaked the filtering results for both search engines. While Bing's results (with "Strict" turned on) tend to focus more on clips from morning TV newscasts, which are generally safe, paging through the results will reveal instructional videos of real self-exams using real women. They're educational and they're helpful, and they should offend no one.

The videos Google retrieved, by comparison, tend to demonstrate the same procedures, but using cartoons or pink bags or, in one case, what appeared to be a silicone breast implant. The effectiveness of such videos may be a little bit less than just showing the full photograph. We also noticed Google's results were far more limited on this one topic -- only a few dozen items, perhaps selected in this particular case by site editors rather than by algorithms, especially since none of these items were frivolous or near-misses.

While Bing's retrievals included some near-misses, none of them that we saw were potential offenders. There were dozens of potentially helpful videos, and yes, a lot of bare breasts. But people sensible enough to be entering this query in the first place, and also sensible enough to have "Strict" filtering turned on, should perhaps not be so easily offended by direct and honest presentation. For this reason -- for actually having the gall to show the breast, but to do so with respect -- I'm awarding this heat to Bing. And that brings our running score to Bing 3, Google 3.

That doesn't mean I'm letting Bing off the hook completely. In a blog post earlier this morning, Bing General Manager Mike Nichols said that in response to some user requests, his team implemented a feature where users -- or applications that perform searches on behalf of users -- can add adlt=strict to the ends of their queries to guarantee filtering. Now, it's a little crazy to expect individuals to type all this information outright, though perhaps you can imagine a firewall or some other anti-malware program capable of adding that switch on the user's behalf.

Or, even more practically, you might imagine a system where the preferences and permissions of the user are stored as part of the ID used to certify her when she logs on. I had thought Microsoft had already come up with that, and it would be nice to see it actually demonstrated someplace other than a convention.