An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 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.
“These search results were unacceptable, and we appreciate Ars Technica making us aware of them,” Microsoft said in an emailed statement on Wednesday evening. “We’ve disabled the preview feature responsible for these results while we examine how they occurred and how we can prevent them in the future.” 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. Microsoft says that its software attempts to filter out pornographic and racy content from results like this. But the company admitted that its filters failed in this case, and it vowed to improve them before re-enabling the feature.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot