Most of the world — especially Islamic and Chinese countries — isn't getting the real Bing.
As reported last week, searching for "sex" or "porn" in Microsoft's new search engine returned dozens of explicit images and videos, as long as the user turns "safe search" off.
Thanks to Bing's autoplay feature, dragging the mouse over a video thumbnail starts playing it immediately — meaning that you can watch hours of hardcore sex without even leaving the Bing Web site (or paying for porn).
But industry analysts say this new move by Microsoft is unlikely to alter the competitive landscape in China, since Microsoft’s share of the search market has been negligible. The market is currently dominated by Baidu and Google, with respective market shares of 59% and 30.6%, according to Internet research firm Analysis International.
Bing can play a video preview from right within the thumbnails on video search result pages, but to implement this, Microsoft has chosen to use Flash.
We would caution, however, that given the heavy promotion of Bing by Microsoft, it is only natural to see some curiousity on the part of internet users regarding their new service.
Microsoft, in the meantime, is investing close to a hundred million dollars in a market, search, where it doesn’t have a hope in hell of making any headway. And Dell can’t seem to figure out how to spend its money and has tried to hire an acquisitions chief who can’t get free of his former employer. Those don’t seem like economic issues to me; they seem more like management issues.
Yahoo will do perfectly fine even if it doesn't strike any type of deal with Microsoft, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said Wednesday.
Bartz says search engine Bing unlikely to make significant mark
--Google CEO, regarding Bing