Is Microsoft’s Bing buying sponsored ads in pornography searches?

TechCrunch: “In private conversations Microsoft employees always said that the porn search feature was an unintended byproduct of good video search. But we always wondered if that was true. Anyway, in May we noticed Bing ads on Google, which seemed a little ironic to us given how seriously the two companies compete with each other. [O]ne thing we didn’t notice until now is that Bing is also advertising on Google for the query ‘pornography.’ Which in our opinion removes all doubt about Bing’s intentions.”

TechCrunch has updated its post to include this disclaimer from Microsoft:

Microsoft has not purchased the keyword ‘pornography,’ and this term has never been in our AdWords account. It is our policy on the Bing marketing team that we do not have any adult content as part of any of our keyword buys or other marketing campaigns. The keyword that seems to be triggering these results is ‘free videos.’ We are following up with Google to understand why this ad is showing up in these types of queries. – Microsoft Spokesperson