Bing Launches Visual Search
Microsoft has launched a new visual search menial duties on Bing, where you get a set of broad-based interactive images to start with, and pass through a strainer it down to the kind of you want based on your successive selections of images from the gallery.
On the visual search domicile page (http://www.bing.com/visualsearch) you start off with broadly defined categories like Digital Cameras, Dog Breeds, New Cars and Travel Destinations.
Bing Visual Search
Selecting ’Travel Destinations’ gives you an alphabetically arranged grid of images with a slider on the right, so you can roll of paper up the gallery. That’s right, it starts at the botton with cities starting with A. The first one is Acapulco.
The launch announcement was made at TechCrunch50 by Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi. The visual search is powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. The data is provided by Fodors Travel.
You can further narrow down your choices based on the best time to visit, continent, country/region, and flight time. You can also arrange the grid based on ‘Popularity on Bing,’ instead of alphabetically.
If you neglect to search for New York, you scroll up the gallery to N, click on Lady Liberty, and you end up with standard Bing web search results. An interesting thing to play with, but it’s not like it’s going to create a revolution in search. Not yet, anyway.
In fact, if you’ve seen Hotels.com’s Visualiser – the VisualDNA hotel search, it’s much closer to what visual search should actually be. Early days yet, though, and as far as search engines are concerned, it’s a good first step for Microsoft.