Bing Loves The Porn Hounds (Updated)

Bing is an excellent search engine. For one thing the surprising early reviews probably forced Yahoo’s hand as they entered into one of the dumber corporate transactions I’ve ever seen. So, kudos to Bing. Golf clap. Etc.

But one thing about Bing really stands out – it may be the best porn search engine ever created (see Badda-Bing Indeed). In private conversations Microsoft employees always said that the porn search feature was an unintended byproduct of good video search. But we always wondered if that was true.

Anyway, in May we noticed Bing ads on Google, which seemed a little ironic to us given how seriously the two companies compete with each other.

But one thing we didn’t notice until now is that Bing is also advertising on Google for the query “pornography.”

Which in our opinion removes all doubt about Bing’s intentions. There’s nothing wrong with being a good porn search engine, in our opinion. And why not go ahead and advertise it to the world.

Discovered via a TechCrunch employee who has asked to remain anonymous.

Update: From Microsoft:

“Microsoft has not purchased the keyword ‘pornography,’ and this term has never been in our AdWords account. It is our policy on the Bing marketing team that we do not have any adult content as part of any of our keyword buys or other marketing campaigns. The keyword that seems to be triggering these results is ‘free videos.’ We are following up with Google to understand why this ad is showing up in these types of queries.” – Microsoft Spokesperson

Update 2: From Google:

“Hi, Mike. Just wanted to follow up quickly on your piece on Bing from a couple of days ago. We can confirm from our side that Microsoft did not advertise on the keyword “pornography”. We have taken steps with Microsoft to ensure that their ads no longer appear in connection with this term.”