Bing vs. Google rematch after Microsoft upgrades explicit filtering

Another potential benefit -- at least some folks will think it's a benefit, others might not -- that Microsoft's Nichols brought up last Friday, is the capability for a business' auditing software to flag the word "explicit" when determining who's receiving content from what source. Of course, that assumes that everything that turns up on the "explicit" URL is truly actionable, something worth pulling an employee into the office for a little discussion.

As we've said before, it doesn't take much ingenuity for any Web user to find explicit content if that's what he wants; the only question is, are the roadblocks mildly effective? When we gave Bing a search term that is, in itself, inoffensive but which might generate questionable results (for instance, a certain actress' name), Bing asked us whether we wanted to turn safe search off -- making the whole filtering bypass concept easier than ever before.

But with filtering turned on at the client side, even bypassing that anthill-sized roadblock results only in an image or video page full of mostly black boxes. On the Videos page, the same search with filtering turned off showed that those items which had been blacked out were clearly candidates for the "potentially offensive" column.

However, there was one other way to check...When we hovered our mouse over the black boxes, the videos played in place anyway. Apparently the images are being filtered through the "explicit" URL, but the videos are not. Microsoft might have wanted to check this out before unleashing this version of filtering as a feature.

There's also a few problems with regard to some of the greyer areas. For example, what if that actress happens to be Britney Spears? As some will be aware, there have been some...unfortunate photos taken of the alleged pop star, in of all places, the drop-off site of a public courthouse. Client-side filtering does result in many of these photos, plus some others that may be in the "risqué" category, to appear as white spaces. And unlike the case with videos, clicking on these white spaces does not result in showing the photos. However, further down the page, the various photo shoots in question (there were more than one) do leave some residue that the explicit filter unfortunately missed.

This is an important subject, because young children may very well be compelled to search for Britney Spears -- she's still a household name -- whereas they might not search for Ginger Lynn (although some may do so now that we revealed her name). The fact that Bing is trying to make the use of search more reliable for parents to entrust with their children, is gratifying and one reason why we're not going to revoke Bing's win over Google on this particular heat. But there's still more effort that has to be done, evidently, to give parents full confidence in this feature.