Bing Smart Motion Preview and SafeSearch

The Bing team address concerns about the Bing SafeSearch settings on their blog:

One important conversation going on right now is about unwanted adult video content within this feature. To start with, by default in Bing (and in Live Search before it), we do not return explicit adult content in video or image results. In web results, we also do not include any explicit images or video content by default. This is a bit more of a conservative approach than others in the industry. If you set SafeSearch to strict, you will not see any explicit text, image or video content. If you turn SafeSearch off – which requires you to change the setting and then click again to acknowledge that you are over 18, then explicit content may appear.

We think our current search safety settings are solid but at Microsoft we are always working on pushing this stuff farther. We also are listening to customers, and some have told us they want more control and they want it now. In particular some folks who manage corporate networks have asked for tools now to enforce SafeSearch settings at the network level. 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. The query would look like this: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=adulttermgoeshere&adlt=strict (yes it is case sensitive).

This short term work-around should work with lots of popular firewall and safety products, as well as for larger, managed network environments.

In the next couple of months we will formalize this work so that a broader range of partners, applications and tools can take advantage of this functionality more easily. In addition, we are looking for more ways to give consumers more control to ensure that Bing gives them a great search experience.