Well, Bill Gates is not as horny as it sounds, but it is true. In an effort to better filter search results, Microsoft has

Bing's logo, obviously

activated its porn-results-only domain, explicit.bing.net. From now on, all search results that have explicit content in them will be redirected to explicit.bing.net, and the results will be served from there. To the end user, this will make no difference.

But for places like libraries and internet cafés (well, some of them), it’s undesirable for GET LAID IN LOS ANGELES TONIGHT to appear in their computers. So, all they have to do is to block the explicit results domain, so they won’t see those kind of results.

After its hard hyped launch, Bing is now by seen by many as an alternative to Google. At the core, Bing is the same as Live Search – I personally haven’t seen an improvement or a change on their crawling and ranking algorithm. What Microsoft did was to add some “features” instead of core search engine performance.

Obviously, Microsoft needed this to remind people that it had a search engine – most people didn’t even know that MSN had its own search engine. So, by adding some nice features such as video previews and categorizing information, Microsoft was able to tout Bing as its “new search engine” whereas in the core, nothing changed much. This enabled Microsoft to advertise like mad and remind people that it had a search engine.

None of the new features on Bing seem to be major game changers, but as I said, it wasn’t Microsoft’s point that they should change the game by adding features or improving their results; the point was to make it known that they had an alternative to Google.

Bing’s (and formerly MSN Search’s) different ranking results from Google mostly occured due to the fact what some people are calling “an outdated algorithm”; that is, not caring much about the site’s quality but putting emphasis on the site’s keywords as defined by META tags etc.

To make it clearer; Bing puts a lot more emphasis on the actual keywords you are searching for, and is pushing the website quality in second place; while what Google does is, taking your keywords, matching them to the context of sites for those keywords and then displaying the best quality websites for that keyword.

So, it’s easier for a smaller site to rank higher for a certain keyword it has puts its emphasis on; which can lead to positive and negative results. The positive results are that you are able to get exactly what you are looking for in the first few sites on Bing’s results page; but the negativity comes from the fact that some low-quality websites are able to attain high positions for important keyword phrases by methods such as keyword-stuffing.

So Google search is usually more reliable, but if you can’t find something you are looking for in Google, I think Bing is a much better alternative than Yahoo.