• by The Riff , June 3, 2009

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.

One of the highly touted new features of Bing is the video search, which plays a short preview of any video the cursor hovers over. It turns out, noted Cnet, this works equally well whether you are checking to see if you found the scene in "Bull Durham" where Kevin Costner curses out an ump or an explicit sex act (even if the browser has been blocked from going to adult content URLs). For an overactive 10-year-old cruising the Wild Wild Web, the temptation could be overwhelming. In all fairness, any kid searching for the rules of ping-pong could end up with quite an eyeful as well.

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?