‘Bing’ is seriously pissing me off.

So, this is a photo of my daughter after eating a s’more:

It was posted in May of ‘08 for a Wordless Wednesday submission.  The premise of the post was a before/after shot of her making a big ol mess with a s’more.  The tags on the Flickr set and photo were: smores, sweetp, marshmallow, graduation, tennessee, trip, travel, and family.  Pretty innocent, no?

Many moons later, Bing launched, and I started noticing disturbing search terms leading to my blog from the Bing search engine.  For example:

Look at numbers 21 and 34. As #30 says, what the fuck?

Upon clicking on these referrers to see what exactly was on my site that kept popping up in sick searches like that, I find this:

Third row, last on right.

And that’s not all.  The terms actually got worse:

Top row, last on right.

Third row, next to last.

So, I obviously was furious, and I shot off a complaint to Bing, explaining the problem and asking how this happened and how we could stop it and prevent it from happening again.

It’s been about a month.  I’ve had no response at all.

I know some will say that is the risk you take when you put your child’s image on the internet.  Perhaps that is right.  It is certainly possible for some freak to troll Flickr for children’s images.  But for an innocently tagged child’s photo to turn up on searches like that, something must have happened along the line that could be stopped.  I know that I never had this happen before Bing, so something in Bing’s algorithm is why this is happening, as far as I can tell.  The photos in the search results lead to my site, so the photo wasn’t harvested and renamed or tagged and put up somewhere else.

Maybe you guys can help me get Bing’s attention and a solution, before someone else’s child’s image is misused for the benefit of sexual predators.

Update 8/11/09 8:49PM: Having heard from Betsy here in the comment section, I have been able to send her an email with the whole kit and kaboodle of what happened.  I will definitely let you all know what the resoution is when we reach it, as well as continuing to respond to each comment individually.

Please know how thankful I am for each and every one of you who took the time to comment, tweet, or even just read and educate yourself on how to know where your traffic is coming from.  Without knowing what kind of referrers you have, it’s difficult to make an educated decision about whether to post photos publicly or not.  I learned again today what a community can do, and I am awed by the power of a group who isn’t afraid to take action.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”. ~Margaret Mead~

Update 8/12/09 2:26PM: Betsy has had Bing take technical steps to remove Emily’s photo from the search terms involved, and the engineers at Bing are looking into making whatever changes need to happen to keep this from happening again.  She said it appears that the association was made due to a post I made about a month later about protecting children from sexual abuse and what to do if it’s suspected.

After thanking Betsy for her efforts, I asked for an explanation of how Bing works so we can all protect our content from being mislabeled in this way, and offered to pass it on to you all.  I think it’s something we all should know, because it appears that otherwise, any time we write about stopping social ills such as abuse, terrorism, domestic violence, etc., we are at risk of having any photo from that page displayed for terms associated with the negative things we write against.