Bing Disables “Trending” Feature After Wildly Inappropriate Results
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:
Bing disables "trending" feature after wildly inappropriate results:
Microsoft has shut down a feature in its Bing search engine that shows popular articles from major websites after Ars Technica reported that the feature was showing wildly inappropriate results from the stock photo site Shutterstock. How inappropriate? Well, here are a couple of screenshots I took on Wednesday morning after a reader tipped me off to the problem:
[screenshots presenting Bing's Trending carousel]
This is what I saw after searching Bing for "Shutterstock." These weren't the very top results-I scrolled down a bit before taking these screenshots-but this "trending articles" carousel appeared on the first page.
I wasn't about to click on a link to "boys erection" without talking to a lawyer first. So my editor advised our tipster to notify the FBI, while I emailed Microsoft and Shutterstock to see if they could explain what was going on.
Happily, Microsoft and Shutterstock confirmed that there was no child porn here. The "boys erection" video is an entirely wholesome video of a boy "erecting" a tent. The "big tits stock video" link went to a video of a bird called a tit. There's nothing pornographic about the "mature mom and young son" video-though it was easy to assume otherwise given the titles of the other links.
[...] As the name suggests, this "trending articles" carousel is supposed to highlight articles on a website (Shutterstock in this case) that are most popular at the moment. Microsoft didn't just shut it down for Shutterstock. It has disabled the feature for all websites.
[...] While Microsoft says it takes full responsibility for not filtering out these results, the company says that all the data-including phrases like "boys erection" and "big tits"-came from Shutterstock's website. The titles shown in these results are not the titles shown on the corresponding video pages. The tent video, for example, is labeled "caucasian dad and son assembling tent on holiday outdoors," not "boys erection."
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