Porn has been a great innovation driver when it comes to the Internet. The Bing search engine now joins the great pantheon of porn-based innovation.

In any case, this is the sort of thing that works child-internet safety watch groups into quite a lather. The only real help we could find for them came from Bob Kessinger, vice president of operations at CyberPatrol, a company that offers consumers filtering software that can, in fact, block the results.

If spokespeople from Microsoft were being honest when they assessed this feature of Bing they wouldn't have pointed out that there is a safe search feature (which any living thing with something resembling a digit can turn off) -- no, they'd have taken full credit and said "We have to find some area where we can beat Google. If it's porn, then it's porn. Let the little brats' parents worry about their delicate sensibilities."

Of course, we live in an imperfect world.

This is no small area of search. It wasn't until late last year that visits to porn sites were surpassed by visits to social media sites, according to HitWise data -- and not by very much, mind you. What if Bing could harness that audience, an audience bigger than that of Facebook, MySpace or Twitter? Well Microsoft did the smart thing: It invented a faster, better, more convenient way to find videos of people having sex with animals. And isn't that what America is all about?