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:





This is what I saw after searching Bing for "Shutterstock." These weren't the very top results—I scrolled down a bit before taking these screenshots—but this "trending articles" carousel appeared on the first page.

I wasn't about to click on a link to "boys erection" without talking to a lawyer first. So my editor advised our tipster to notify the FBI, while I emailed Microsoft and Shutterstock to see if they could explain what was going on.

Happily, Microsoft and Shutterstock confirmed that there was no child porn here. The "boys erection" video is an entirely wholesome video of a boy "erecting" a tent. The "big tits stock video" link went to a video of a bird called a tit. There's nothing pornographic about the "mature mom and young son" video—though it was easy to assume otherwise given the titles of the other links.

"Little girl peeing" is a video of a toddler wearing a shirt and sitting on a toilet. Her hands are in her lap, obscuring her crotch. There's nothing sexual about the video, and it's easy to imagine it being used as B-roll in a training video for a pediatrician's office.

One of the videos does seem to be mildly pornographic. "Girl takes off panties" features an adult woman removing her underwear. The video is racy but not explicit and might be used as B-roll in an ad for condoms or sex toys.

“We’ve disabled the preview feature”

"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.

"Having reviewed the video clips, Shutterstock can confirm that the content is available on the platform and is in compliance with our content policy," Shutterstock said in a Thursday morning email. "However, the titles of the videos on what appears to be a 'Trending Articles' feature on Bing do not match the titles of the videos available on Shutterstock. We are in contact with Microsoft on the matter and requested to have Shutterstock content removed from the feature."

While Microsoft says it takes full responsibility for not filtering out these results, the company says that all the data—including phrases like "boys erection" and "big tits"—came from Shutterstock's website. The titles shown in these results are not the titles shown on the corresponding video pages. The tent video, for example, is labeled "caucasian dad and son assembling tent on holiday outdoors," not "boys erection."

But the video has a bunch of tags, including "boy" and "erection." This is presumably because the boy and his dad are "erecting" a tent. The video comes up as the top result if you use Shutterstock's search engine to search videos for "boys erection." Another top result for that search is this video in which "two boys erect buildings" using plastic blocks. Similarly, the bird video has "big tit" in its description, making it a top search result for the phrase "big tits."

So it seems that Shutterstock exposed this metadata to Bing's search engine in a way that caused Bing to think that "big tits stock video" was a reasonable title for the bird video.

Of course, this doesn't explain why Bing chose to expose those particular pages as its top "trending articles" on Shutterstock. Microsoft tells Ars that the choice of which articles to feature in the "trending" section is also determined by Shutterstock via metadata provided automatically to search engine crawlers. I wasn't able to confirm this claim for myself and have asked Shutterstock to weigh in.

Either way, I have to assume that this was the result of a prank. It can't be a coincidence that four innocuous videos with suggestive titles all became trending topics at the same time. It could have been the work of a hacker or a disgruntled Shutterstock employee, or perhaps pranksters in the shadier corners of the Internet figured out how to drive traffic to those videos in a way that caused them to show up as trending articles on Bing.