Bing is an excellent search engine. For one thing the surprising early reviews probably forced Yahoo’s hand as they entered into one of the dumber corporate transactions I’ve ever seen. So, kudos to Bing. Golf clap. Etc.
But one thing about Bing really stands out – it may be the best porn search engine ever created (see Badda-Bing Indeed). In private conversations Microsoft employees always said that the porn search feature was an unintended byproduct of good video search. But we always wondered if that was true.
Anyway, in May we noticed Bing ads on Google, which seemed a little ironic to us given how seriously the two companies compete with each other.
But one thing we didn’t notice until now is that Bing is also advertising on Google for the query “pornography.”
Which in our opinion removes all doubt about Bing’s intentions. There’s nothing wrong with being a good porn search engine, in our opinion. And why not go ahead and advertise it to the world.
Discovered via a TechCrunch employee who has asked to remain anonymous.
Update: From Microsoft:
“Microsoft has not purchased the keyword ‘pornography,’ and this term has never been in our AdWords account. It is our policy on the Bing marketing team that we do not have any adult content as part of any of our keyword buys or other marketing campaigns. The keyword that seems to be triggering these results is ‘free videos.’ We are following up with Google to understand why this ad is showing up in these types of queries.” – Microsoft Spokesperson
Update 2: From Google:
“Hi, Mike. Just wanted to follow up quickly on your piece on Bing from a couple of days ago. We can confirm from our side that Microsoft did not advertise on the keyword “pornography”. We have taken steps with Microsoft to ensure that their ads no longer appear in connection with this term.”
MSFT is awesome and Bing porn is phenomenal.
but WHO searches for porn with the keyword “pornography” – that’s about the un-porny form of the word
Who?
It’s a screenshot of Mike’s computer, right?
how exactly did you “find” this out?
I wasn’t looking up porn, errr…I mean I was only looking it up to find out how to get away from it.
They didn’t find anything out. This is a classic example of just how wrong techcrunch usually is in its reporting efforts. Another bs halfassed speculative total miss by the kings of the new media. Epic Fail, again, and again, and again, and again…..
I guess Bing discovered a great potential in that “unintended byproduct of good video” search and is now using it to hook users.
What, you ask MSFT to go ahead and advertise itself as porn search engine? Will that not be backing out of normal search and finding refuge in porn search? Damn sure Bing will not advertise openly about this…maybe it will remain a world-known secret that Bing is better when it comes to porn
Badda Baddie Bing indeed!
I don’t get a Bing advert. Is this US-only, or did MS just stop sponsoring “pornography”?
I know.. don’t you usually know the good porn sites.. all you have to do is type of the type of porn… and the word tube.. maybe I am saying to much… hey did you notic in the jobs they have VP of people? I want to be the vice president of people… That has got tto be the oddest job title…
this is completly stupid!
you could pick and choose a query that would make google look bad! maybe some query educating how to construct a bomb! how to kill dogs, etc… etc…
now, the thing that the Information gigoloogle did there is cheap! It shows how the Chuch of Googlentology is SO arrogant!
What the hell are you rambling on about??
Bing really stands out – it may be the best porn search engine ever created ??????
>>>>>> It looks very cheap. Standing out in Pornography search query does not gives a majestic status for Bing in my opinion. Many anti-laws are emerging in case of child-pornography.
Lol@The employee who asked to remain anonymous.
MG Siegler is the only one who has a constant hard on for anything MS related(and Bing now) that could be spun into snark or ridicule.
To TC’s credit, y’all keep driving traffic to Bing with these stories.
oh…this is priceless
Bing banging.
bing comes up on a lot of search queries. as you can see, the word “pornography” isnt highlighted in the ad, so its obvious that they come up on thousands of random words like this.
yellow journalism.
“Anyway, in May we noticed Bing ads on Google, which seemed a little ironic to us given how seriously the two companies compete with each other.
”
yahoo advertises on google too. ask.com does too.
everyone basically does, so what? its not ironic, its what you need to do to advertise online as of right now.
uh huh.
Good going man. I knew TC sucked, but didn’t know your IQ has dropped to a new level.
If you do 3 searches back to back, for example:
Search Query # 1: “Apple”
Search Query # 2: “Banana”
Search Query # 3: “Carrot”
You will find that when you are on search query # 2, the ads may be shown for search query # 1.
Also, if you on search query # 3, you may find ads appearing for search query # 1 and # 2 along with the current query.
So, in your case, there is a very good reason on bing showing up based on your past few queries.
The above comment is the most important one, and highlights how TC has VERY low journalism standards, I mean blog standards.
TC sucks. Bunch of morons
Why does everyone who hate TC fail to leave their website urls?
The Question is solved by this comment, case closed.
Actually, this brings up an important question about Google ad placement.
Can Google hurt brands by inappropriate ad placement because it was based on earlier searches or it was incorrectly targeted i.e., unrelated to the adwords bought? Do brands have any recourse for such things?
As examples, what if there is a situation where someone searching for “teen gay sex” sees an ad for a catholic church, a search for “unhealthy foods” brings up an ad for McDonalds, etc.
Can the brands sue for defamation by inappropriate association?
I think everyone is missing the big picture here: Michael googles pornography
so what? lots of people do… i find it cute that when it comes to pr0n a lot of people immediately take a moral highground… ‘pr0n? me? never!’ yadda yadda, so many hippocrites out there…
pr0n made the web big (e-commerce, credit card payments, video streaming and much more)!
Juggies!
dont u mean p0rn…
For google its called being stuck between a rock and a hard place. i.e. competition and regulation.
“Discovered via a TechCrunch employee who has asked to remain anonymous.”
LOL.
So is TechCrunch a good place to work for since the employees get to watch porn all day or is it a bad place to work for since they publicly expose their wankers? Sorry sorry, I meant to write employees again…
;p
I wish i can work for Techcrunch !
Haha, Mike. Way to preserve someone’s identity by linking to their twitter account, which links to the employee’s profile page on techcrunch.
oh damn i thought i took that out.
Classic.
surely
why would he hide his identity? oh wait, does your gf know?
heh, while google be holier-than-thou and show public service ads in the banner above this article….
and i like how the picture has the old google button
i thought your last article on google said the new buttons were square?
photoshop?
no we wrote a greasemonkey script
do as u wish with ur monkey but plz keep it discrete
are you the guy who writes the monologue for jimmy fallon?
BURN.
haha……that employee did a great job
I bet that anonymous Techcrunch employee is MG Siegler considering he’s always online like 2 AM doing “research” for future posts.
probably. that guys is odd.
“that guys is odd.”
Is that a typo or a grammatical error? Please blog about it.
+1
you know, I do all the research and then mike gets the porn post.
@basementdad i think, that is taken from safari browser
i have yet to use bing
MS is spending money with the enemy to beat the enemy.
I love it.
It’s most likely broad matched on some other term… Google’s broad match type is very unpredictable.
waaaaaaaaaaaa
Right on. Last weekend I noticed Bing buying the keyword “Google Porn Searches” (or, more likely, broad-matching the keyword “Google”).
See my post “Bing is Serious about its Porn: http://bit.ly/zE103
See also my proposed Too-Hot-for-TV Bing commercial: http://bit.ly/b5ANs
there is something wrong with bing’s google adwords accounts
Michael Arrington,
You said in this article that …”There’s nothing wrong with being a good porn search engine, in our opinion.”
Your statement above says you support making it easy for minors to find and view porn; and that you support companies advertising their expertise at searching for and presenting porn to users.
Society has deemed exposing minors to pron to be immoral, unhealthy and inappropriate; so much so that society has laws prohibiting the sale of pron to minors.
Your statement implies that porn is not harmful to adult society either.
However, numerous serial rapists and sex-related serial murders, during interviews with psychiatrists, attribute a significant root cause of their mental depravity’s instigation and cultivation to their exposure to and subsequent use of porn.
Porn is also thought to contribute to misogyny, due to the denigrating poses and situations of the women in porn imagery.
Porn also contributes to marital strife due to the unrealistic expectations men develop of women’s bodies from viewing air brushed images of beautiful young women. It also creates marital strife by blocking marital intimacy due to porn images crowding out one’s attention to and concentration on their spouse during lovemaking.
Internet pron addiction has become epidemic and is causing the ruination of primary relationships and has lead to suicide.
With this all being true, there certainly is something wrong about Bing or any other business developing and then bragging about their ability to subject society to porn.
If you to let your statement stand without retraction or significant modification, you would be doing so while being publicly fully aware of the harm your current statement endorses.
Lighten up, Francis.
‘lighten up, francis’
lol..utterly brilliant
…nice one man.. 
Just an observation, you needed to get laid and watch some Bill Maher.
for minors to view porn?
Come on. It had be well known since 15 years ago, viewing porn was among to top driving force of the internet boomsssss.
You know what contributes to misogyny? Religious oppression. All in the history books, baby.
Porn??? (ears perked up) Where???
Whatever Glenn, there is a disadvantage to linking to your twitter account when you have been asking for a donkey around the Washington D.C. area and claim not to like porn.
I believe bestiality is illegal and Jesus would frown on both you and the donkey.
While I agree that porn is demeaning, so is working at Wal-Mart. So I guess some people just choose the job with better office parties.
Best. Comment. Ever.
“However, numerous serial rapists and sex-related serial murders, during interviews with psychiatrists, attribute a significant root cause of their mental depravity’s instigation and cultivation to their exposure to and subsequent use of porn.”
The self assessment of people with mental problems is your leading argument? Really? I am going to go out on a limb here and say the likelihood that without porn they would have been totally normal is roughly zero.
“Porn also contributes to marital strife due to the unrealistic expectations men develop of women’s bodies from viewing air brushed images of beautiful young women.”
LOL I wonder which industry is most well known for presenting airbrushed images of beautiful young women. Maybe the fashion industry, which last time I checked was pretty much directed at women… utter fail.
I have some bad news for you my friend human males are genetically predisposed to sexually prefer young fertile women, it is natural and well documented. If seeing an attractive young women is going to make you dissatisfied with your spouse then you are in trouble because attractive young women are everywhere…
pwned! lol
actually porn is useful for clearing the mind.. men masturbate… besides irt is a choice to watch porn
i just wish the internet was there when i was a “minor” – everything would have been so much less confusing.
Your statement above says you support making it easy for minors to find and view porn; and that you support companies advertising their expertise at searching for and presenting porn to users.
I missed that part, this is like saying supporting the first amendment means that you think it is okay to play loud music to annoy Gitmo detainees.
I can’t believe all the canned spam responses that I got related to an article I wrote in my blog about Bing a few months ago. I still keep getting responses.
The respones all talk about how good Bing is (which it is not) but they also include a weblink to a website for prescription drugs.
I’m glad Wordpress has a spam filter, otherwise these fixed endorsements would mean free advertising for both Bing and the spammers that are working for Microsoft.
It does show in India and so may be they are not targeting all over the world
Probably you meant – it does not show in India.
I did not get BING for the same query in New Delhi.
Bing just rose about 10 points in my estimation. On a scale of 1 to 10.
Yikes we can call that GangBingBangers.. they need to get laid.:P
The Bing Bus?
Trust me on this, Bing sucks as a porn search engine. Google is far superior.
yes look at all the “targeted” ads on the page below the Bing ad for porn sites.
It’s what keeps google #1.
Yeah great. Consider the name too – BING. Now that you mention it sounds so horny. Its only a matter of time that geeks start to mention: “oh baby bing me…bing me …BING ME”
Bing is definitely the best porn search engine. Uh, at least that’s what I hear.
I see in.com (an indian portal) in the sponsored result for that query!
Latest Videos For Free
http://www.In.com
Free Video Top Rated, Featured Latest Videos
Oh come on Techcrunch, stop promoting Bing for tiny things.
It seems you walked into a targeted ad.
Wonder what’s in your cookies… *raised eyebrow*
haha, that was a good laugh
bing google and google bing
who will lead the internet in the future
As another comment pointed out, the Google ads may be based on more than the keyword you are searching on… I don’t know enough about what it takes to generate a particular google ad in a search result page, and you don’t address this question. Also Google runs several different servers, and different servers may give you different search results as well as different ads, no? Another thing, I dunno how busy you are, but it’d be nice if you could try to get a comment from the company you are writing an article about. I’d like to see something more approaching journalism. When writing an opinion piece, it should be about something interesting… Look at what you’ve written here… you’ve written that in your opinion because X comes up as an advertisement when you search for Y, this yields Z as a reasonable conclusion… in your opinion. I think you should only make such statements when something is prima facie evident… in such a case, feel free to point it out. But this is not such a case. In this case the most you can say is that Bing might be paying for results on a given keyword… or… they might not be… Hell, you could even extrapolate that maybe a Google employee keyed Bing in for this keyword as a prank… It’s the kind of tomfoolery I would pull if I worked for Google… : – )
Also… would it be possible to post emoticons without them being converted into graphical icons? Sometimes what I type is what I want…
i’ve never heard of google showing an advertiser’s ad when the advertiser didn’t bid on the keyword – this would tamper with their auction and pricing models which drive the majority of their business. Of course, google does optimize which eligible ads get shown based on search query history, but eligible ads are still restricted to advertisers that are bidding on the current search query.
So, it seems msft did bid on this kw. Having said that, “broad” match is a bit of black box. Perhaps MSFT (and AOL, if you hit refresh a few times, video.aol.com shows up) are bidding on non-Adult KW with some loose connection to pornography that google is determining to be a “broad” match. Or, maybe they are just staight up bidding “pornography” on exact match (unlikely).
Either way, MSFT and AOL are like using automated bid management systems that found a positive correlation between their video sites and “pornography”. My hunch is while maybe not directly buying “pornography” as a bidded keyword, but they are (were, its not showing for me) unintentionally triggering it through a “broad” match KW.
Lesson learned: Negative “phrase” or “exact” match your black listed KWs on Google’s side.
Or maybe I’m just dead wrong and the guy in charge of growing Bing’s porn usage is friends with their SEM guy.
VHS won the battle thanks to adult movies.
Maybe Bing will win the battle for the same reason.
to be fair, Ask does it too: http://skitch.com/t/s84
This is no fixed.
Sincerely,
Me
Bing now
Ballmer loves pornography as Gates loves
Some sort of Redesign on Bing Homepage as wel .
I love bing home page .
This article may just increase bing’s traffic
Was this a Sponsored Post from Bing? Call me psychotically skeptical; but seriously doubt the credibility of this post!
I expect no more jpgs of text. Go png next time it isn’t 2002 any more.
I’m gay and find search engines too overwhelming for finding porn and prefer targeted niche directory sites like Must See Men and Just Us Boys to weed out all the good stuff for me. But thanks for this article. I may have to give Bing another look.
so you learned image formats? congtats! way to go champ!
It not the ponography that bad it the people who use ponography that bad.
if you happen to use Google adwords then you would know most of the time you don’t type all the targeted keywords yourself instead there is a keyword tool that would create a list of keywords for you and for instance when i type ‘ blog ‘ it generates a lot of related keywords automatically and most of time i add them all without noticing anyone contains word like porn or whatever.
that said, i have tested bing video search yes it’s seriously amazing… they let you sort by latest porn videos etc..
I just searched for the term “pornography” seems as though they’ve removed it now.
Ok really how is Bing any good. Yahoo is still better then Bing. If the only reason is to switch from Google is to switch then go ahead but dont tell people its good.
good article about bing over here: http://onthebut...03/naming_bing/
This is so coool! Bing rock!
its funny how everybody complains..mostly these family value people..Soccer moms trying to be all moral..GUESS WHAT..YOUR HUSBANDS ON THE OTHER COMPUTER WATCHING THIS PORN WHILE YOURS ON YOURS COMPLAINING..HAHA..