You know those Bing ads? They're trying to convince you that Bing is better than Google, and you just want to tell them, "Stop trying to make Bing happen; it's not going to happen"? Well, it turns out that Bing does have one really significant advantage over Google: it's better at helping you find porn. Who would have thought?
According to Internet citizens (you hope they know these things; the Internet is a porn site after all), Bing is just better at serving you porn. While the exact cause is unclear, a theory prevalent online is that it has something to do with Google's filters. Reddit professor zweistein said, "Google [sic] introduced filters a while ago that remove a lot of pornographic content from search results even if you have SafeSearch turned off. Bing doesn't do that and actually gives you the content you're looking for of pornographic content.”
Plus, Bing has a video preview feature, which means you can theoretically watch porn without actually clicking on any porn site, which is great for your internet history. Instead, you just hover your cursor over the video. The preview doesn't play the entire video, nor does it play everything in succession, but porn is still porn. What's more, Google hasn't made the video preview feature available to anyone yet.
But does Bing really give you better porn search results? Well, speaking of image results, I'll leave that to EJ Dickson of the Daily Dot, who was either braver than me at typing in the search bar, or just in a place with fewer people around (curse you, coffee shop and your employees). But even just searching the word "porn" directly on the web reveals some significant differences between the two search engines. Here are the top results for typing "porn" into Google:
Here's what you get from Bing:
Google starts off promising, but after two results it breaks into the entire "News about porn" section, which really ruins the mood. Who wants news about porn? If I wanted news about porn, I would type in "porn news." Bing, on the other hand, doesn't just show you actual porn sites, it also provides useful related searches, including some that I didn't want to know existed. I mean, "pretty weird parent porn"? Really? Bing, why are you ruining my childhood?
Overall, Bing does seem to be better at serving you porn, judging by its search results, video preview capabilities, and the fact that it seems easier to turn off SafeSearch. But that’s actually not surprising — it’s actually what I would expect from a search engine whose ads strongly hint at daddy issues associated with Google. No, surprisingly Bing actually does beat Google in some areas. Who would have thought? I mean, I know Bing is the third most popular search engine in the world, but that still means they lost out to Yahoo, so that's not saying much.
But when it comes to porn, they seem to be number one. Now, whether they like feminist porn or not, that's another story. Although a search for "feminist porn" on Bing yields only 1.6 million results compared to 6 million on Google, the outlook is not promising. I guess Google isn’t the only company with gender equality issues.