Monday, Jun 8, 2009    Text size: 

Last week, online reports broke showing that Bing's video search lets users mouse over preview thumbnails to instantly play videos in browser. That means users can watch porn directly on the Bing search results page.

But new reports reveal that many countries across the middle and far east are blocking porn-related searches on Bing. This includes most Muslim countries, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey.

India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and Thailand are also feeling the sting of the ban. The one Western European country included is Germany. A Microsoft spokesperson tried to explain the logic behind the banning pattern.

"We determined the list of countries for which sexually explicit results are restricted based on analysis of where such are restricted by local law, but we did not take these actions in response to specific government demands or regulations," he said.

The ban in these countries only includes the video search. Users can still retrieve explicit images. The United Kingdom, France, Russia and Japan all get full video results, although online reports indicate that more explicit videos are pushed further down the results queue somehow.

Israel gets no porn-related pictures or videos of any kind. In India, users can declare themselves citizens of the United States, Canada or Australia to get full results.