Bing 219
as a verb in the context of an internet search.[58]
According to the Guardian "[Microsoft] hasn't confirmed that it stands recursively for Bing Is Not Google, but that's
the sort of joke software engineers enjoy."[59] Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that
Bing's official Chinese name is bì yìng (simplified Chinese: 必 应; traditional Chinese: 必 應), which literally
means "very certain to respond" or "very certain to answer" in Chinese.[60]While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing's codename was Kumo (く も),[61] which came from the
Japanese word for spider (蜘 蛛; く も, kumo) as well as cloud (雲; く も, kumo), referring to the manner in which
search engines "spider" Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing.Legal challenges
On July 31, 2009, The Laptop Company, Inc. released a press release stating that it is challenging Bing's trademark
application, alleging that Bing may cause confusion in the marketplace as Bing and their product BongoBing both do
online product search.[62] Software company TeraByte Unlimited, which has a product called BootIt Next
Generation (abbreviated to BING), also contended the trademark application on similar grounds, as did a
Missouri-based design company called Bing! Information Design.[63]
Microsoft contends that claims challenging its trademark are without merit because these companies filed for U.S.
federal trademark applications only after Microsoft filed for the Bing trademark in March 2009.[64]Adult content
Video content
Bing's video search tool has a preview mode that could potentially be used to preview pornographic videos.[65] By
simply turning off safe search, users can search for and view pornographic videos by hovering the cursor over a
thumbnail, since the video and audio, in some cases, are cached on Microsoft's Server.
Since the videos are playing within Bing instead of the site where they are hosted, the videos are not necessarily
blocked by parental control filters. Monitoring programs designed to tell parents what sites their children have
visited are likely to simply report "Bing.com" instead of the site that actually hosts the video. The same situation can
be said about corporate filters, many of which have been fooled by this feature.[66] Users do not need to leave Bing's
site to view these videos.[67][68]
Microsoft responded in a blog post on June 4, 2009, with a short term work-around.[69] By adding “&adlt=strict” to
the end of a query, no matter what the settings are for that session it will return results as if safe search were set to
strict. The query would look like this: http:/ / http://www. bing. com/ videos/ search?q=adulttermgoeshere& adlt=strict
(case sensitive).
On June 12, 2009, Microsoft announced two changes regarding Bing's Smart Motion Preview and SafeSearch
features. All potentially explicit content will be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net.
Additionally, Bing will also return source URL information in the query string for image and video contents. Both
changes allow both home users and corporate users to filter content by domain regardless of what the SafeSearch
settings might be.[70]