Microsoft has added an additional filter to its Bing search engine to help block what some have called an unexpected portal to porn.

Microsoft said it has filtered out explicit content by default since Bing launched earlier this week. Bing also added a voice service, 800-BING-411, as well as a mobile site and a redesign of its Farecast service, now known as Bing Travel.

Some, however, have complained that users who explicitly request a Bing search that includes adult content will receive videos with explicit content without needing to leave the Bing site itself. One of Bing’s features, called Smart Motion Previews, creates a 30-second “trailer” of the content on the Bing site itself, offering up a snippet of the movie to the user.

Microsoft defended the Smart Motion Previews technology.

“What’s cool about the technology is that it helps you decide if it is a video you want to go watch,” Mike Nichols, Bing’s general manager, wrote in a blog post. “This makes it easier to sort through the clutter of all those results and help you get to what you are looking for. And as a publisher, when people leave Bing for your site (and require bandwidth on your servers) it tends to be higher quality traffic because folks are sure of what they wanted to watch. Plus, we think it’s pretty cool.”

However, Nichols said that Microsoft is adding an additional layer of protection. “So for right now, we wanted to let people know that you can add “adlt=strict” to the end of a query and no matter what the settings are for that session, it will return results as if safe search was set to strict,” Nichols wrote. “The query would look like this: /videos/search?q=adulttermgoeshere&adlt=strict (yes it is case sensitive).”

The additional filter is designed to let current firewall and parental-control programs filter out searches that could return adult content, and to filter results at the network level. In the next couple of months Microsoft plans to formalize the process for the company’s partners, Nichols added.

“We think our current search safety settings are solid but at Microsoft we are always working on pushing this stuff farther,” Nichols wrote. “We also are listening to customers, and some have told us they want more control and they want it now.”

Source: /

Windows 7 is scheduled for an October 22 release, Microsoft confirmed Tuesday.

Microsoft will also provide a “tech guarantee” upgrade option for those using older versions of the Windows operating system.

The release to manufacturers (RTM) is expected in late July, a spokesman said

Steve Guggenheimer, vice president of Microsoft’s OEM division, provided more details during a Wednesday morning keynote at Computex in Taipei. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft will eliminate an artificial limitation that prevents three concurrent applications from running under Windows 7 Starter Edition for netbooks, the company said late Friday.

The operating system will also be permitted on small notebooks, the company said, although it wasn’t exactly clear how Microsoft plans to differentiate between the two. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft officially rolled out its Bing search engine on Monday, two days ahead of its scheduled June 3 release. The software giant provided a sneak peak at Bing last week at the D: All Things Digital (D7) conference in Carlsbad, Calif.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, said at the time. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web.” Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft is reporting that a vulnerability in DirectShow in some versions of Windows is being exploited in the wild. DirectShow is a framework for playing various media types.

The attacks are being perpetrated using malicious QuickTime media files in what Microsoft calls “limited, active attacks.” The vulnerability can cause remote code execution in the context of the logged-in user.There is no patch for the vulnerability yet. Read the rest of this entry »

While Google slips in new features every few weeks, Microsoft favors the big launch, and for its major push into the search market that launch is today. For the past week, the tech press has been speculating that instead of using the project’s code name, Kumo, the final product would be called Bing; those speculations turned out to be true, as announced at the D7 conference in Carlsbad, California. Microsoft told us the new service, located at www.bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3. Feature-wise, the Bing of today is identical to the Kumo of last week, and our slideshow provides you with an accurate walkthrough of Microsoft’s new search site. Read the rest of this entry »

A weekend e-mail from Microsoft incorrectly stated the start date for bi-hourly Windows 7 beta shutdowns, the company said in a Tuesday blog post. Read the rest of this entry »

Google on Thursday unveiled the latest version of its Chrome browser, moving the product out of beta and promising speed boosts of up to 30 percent. How does it measure up?

If you are already using the beta version of Chrome, the features will be familiar, including the speedier JavaScript performance of the browser’s V8 interpreter. Google touts a 30 percent speed increase for Chrome; my testing actually showed a 44 percent improvement. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you think the Conficker hysteria was over? Think again.

The little virus that could is still infecting about 50,000 new PCs every day, according to Guy Bunker, a computer security expert at Symantec. Read the rest of this entry »

While everyone is busy debating the merits of Google versus Wolfram Alpha (and, on occasion, Twitter search), Yahoo, the one-time king of the search engine, is busy mapping out its future, a game plan that the company’s head of search strategy, Prabhakar Raghavan, outlined yesterday at an event in San Francisco. Read the rest of this entry »