Find Gadgets, Travel Destinations, Yoga Poses Visually with Bing
We've given Bing a fair share of ink here at Business Hacks. Microsoft's underdog search engine is doing some innovative things, and in our totally unscientific reader poll, we found Bing earned a respectable 30 percent share compared to Google's 48 percent.
Well, we have an update: Last week, Bing rolled out Visual Search, an interesting update that makes certain kinds of searches easier, more intuitive, and fun.
If you choose a topic for which there is a visual search, you get a slew of thumbnails that represent the whole landscape of potential search results. You can browse the whole field, or filter the results. For example, if you choose digital cameras, you can narrow your options by megapixel, zoom, brand, or other criteria. It's all interactive (using Silverlight) and you can change your filters at any time.
Bing Visual Search actually quite compelling. Searching for a camera or cell phone, for example, it's great to be able to see all the cameras right up front, since the visuals are a part of the search criteria, and you can more easily identify many products by eye than by name.
Of course, there are a limited number of visual search experiences right now. Besides shopping -- which includes GPS devices, iPhone apps, cars, TVs, phones, and cameras -- you can search visually for such categories as movies, music, TV shows, travel destinations, sports information, and politicians. And, of course, the yoga poses. There are about 45 categories in all.
If you agree that Bing Visual Search is pretty neat, you might also want to check out some of these other posts: