Friday, Jun 12, 2009    Text size: 

Microsoft's new search engine, which hit the online world this month with great fanfare and the startling news that it actually works, drew critical fire — and praise in some circles — for its proficiency in finding and presenting adult videos.

After getting its video search banned across most of the far east and a few other countries, Microsoft has added new search safety controls to its new product.

They're calling the new feature SafeSearch. Users can set this feature to different levels of intensity, with "strict" being the highest setting. It's also the default setting for a video search.

"If you set SafeSearch to strict, you will not see any explicit text, image, or video content," a Microsoft official said. "If you turn SafeSearch off, which requires you to change the setting and then click again to acknowledge that you are over 18, then explicit content may appear."

Webmasters and network managers who want to add SafeSearch measures into their code can add "&adlt=strict" to the end of any query to activate it.

Without SafeSearch enabled, users can use Bing to find thousands of adult videos, which they can play on the Bing search results page by simply mousing over the thumbnail preview images.