A few weeks ago, in our ongoing series of duels between the reigning champion search engine Google and the contender “decision engine” Bing, we gave Bing the edge in a battle of the image filters: With both search engines’ explicit image filtering turned on, we were able to explore a very sensitive topic — breast cancer — and have Bing yield sensible and respectful, but sometimes graphic, images without presenting offensive content.

Since that time, as we reported last week, Microsoft has implemented a very practical concept for helping individuals and businesses to ensure filtering takes place — this after complaints were raised about how ridiculously simple it is for any user to turn filtering off in both Bing and Google. As Bing General Manager Mike Nichols announced on Friday, the thumbnails of images which Bing deems to be of a sensitive nature will be sent through a specific URL, explicit.bing.net. That way, users can take extra steps to filter questionable content.