Microsoft launches Bing 'Visual Search'
You see that headline? "Visual Search" is in quotation marks because Monday's announcement at the TechCrunch 50 conference about Bing's new search feature is a bit of a canard.
What Microsoft is launching is very cool, mind you. It's just not, strictly speaking, a search feature. At least not a general one.
The new feature shows you pretty Silverlight-powered fly-in thumbnail images for only 50 specific search results (it will be expanded in the future), such as "Digital cameras," "New cars," "MLB players," and "Top songs." As you refine a query from one of the 50 visual searches available, thumbnails that don't match your query anymore fly off screen, and the rest reshuffle to fill in the blank spaces.
In a demo (download it here; no audio), the feature looks fantastic, and search results link to other nicely functioning Bing search results pages and widgets, like shopping pages and sports player stats boxes.
Bing Visual Search loads up a page with visual thumbnails of what you're looking for. This example shows yoga poses.
(Credit: Microsoft )The Visual Search feature showcases the real value of having a search engine that blends structured data into its results. Google has structured data, too. (Try searching for the title of a movie that's currently playing in theaters). But Bing pushes it further. In travel, sports, and product reviews, for example, Bing is extremely aggressive in displaying structured data. Bing also has Powerset technology (it acquired the company in 2008) for analyzing Wikipedia content.
But as with Wolfram Alpha, Bing's visual and textual filters don't work for the offbeat and weird, for a query that's not phrased just right to be picked up by the structured query engine, or for what people might consider ordinary little searches. Type in a less mainstream query, and you're skimming a sea of indexed text from Web pages, not structured data. Bing is still a good general-purpose search engine, mind you, but it does not beat Google as the king of the long tail.
Still, it makes business sense to pour resources into popular searches. Optimizing for the short snout pays. That's the model that made About.com worth $410 million to The New York Times in 2005. And that's what entrepreneur and TechCrunch50 co-host Jason Calacanis is aiming for with his curated directory, Mahalo.
I'd wager that this is how Bing is making its gains in market share. Latest Nielsen data says Bing gained 22 percent month-over-month in August, taking it to 10.7 percent of all U.S. searches. People probably try Bing for a travel or product search (where there's also a cash-back financial kicker) and remember their good experience, and then they try it for more obscure searches and find it good enough. It highlights, I believe, an important flaw in Google's historic strategy of indexing the entire Web equally well and making the user interface fast and consistent above all, as opposed to specializing as dictated by the query.
Previously: Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
http://www.bing.com/visualsearch
Looks very cool!
is it per post or it is flat monthly rate? just curious
I don't know whether you've noticed: Recently Microsoft has done a lot of cool stuff. Windows 7, Bing, Xbox Natal, Zune HD, Office web apps, ... Microsoft is cool again.
http://www.bing.com/visualsearch
looks really cool!
Cool "again?" Microsoft? When was the first time they were "cool."
Please, how much are you being paid to spout such nonsense? Not even the biggest MS fanboy would make such a ridiculous statement.
Correction: Mobile 7 is vaporware. WinNoMo is a joke.
So if its not cool you just aren't interested? When did technology become a fashion accessory?
all of these goats are retarded.
But don't bother waiting ... searching using lots of images is more for big screen surfers than teensy screen surfers. I mean, seriously, how many images can you fit intelligently in a2x3 window? 12? A basic Bing image result has 50 images within a 600 pixel wide display. It's okay for desktop users, but the emerging market for mobile surfers will not find this so useful until it is tailored to them, and even then, small screen image searching is mind-numbing.
Frankly, the raves I have read seem more to be instructions for how to understand what is expected of the searcher, rather than honest evaluations of the concept of drill-down image-based search. If I had any idea what Manny Rodriguez looked like then maybe using his face as the top of a search tier might be a good idea, but otherwise I'd just search for "manny rodriguez" and use textual cues to drill-down. Visual only works well when the user is visually inclined and has a good idea what the item they seek looks like. Otherwise, a digital camera is a digital camera is a digital camera ... they all look pretty much the same, visually.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you said at the top of your post, but Silverlight does not require you to use IE. I've written a few Silverlight apps and I rarely open them in anything other than Chrome.
When did Apple get into the search market?
http://www.bing.com/visualsearch?q=Top+iPhone+apps&g=iphone_apps&FORM=Z9GE62
(I have an iPhone and I'm painfully aware of its lack of support for things like Flash/Silverlight.)
However I do have much better luck with Google maps as apposed to Bing maps. I'll give them that for sure.
1) http://www.bing.com/visual search
2) "los angeles dodgers"
3) Oops ... no Visual Search results ... back we go ...
4) Hey, there's a whole MLB category? How come I can't search visually for Los Angeles Dodgers"?
5) Oh, I get it ... I go to Visual Search, find the category MLB Teams", look for the little Dodgers logo, click on the logo and THEN I get the normal Bing textual results.
Yeah. Much more intuitive that simply typing in "los angeles dodgers".
So Visual Search is NOT for grouping or any type of semantic or AI advantages, it's just for people who have a hard time typing words into a search box, or at least for those who only like to type in words one time. It's starting to make sense ... Bing ... superior for those who do not type and who do not mind rooting around on a couple of "category" pages before finding images they want to click on. Got it. Cool!
Right now "visual search" is just a technology preview. Once past beta, it will undoubtedly have a seamless interface, and will be integrated with the rest of Bing.
This is no different from Google's approach when rolling out new search features. For example, Google Maps used to be completely separate application from Google's main search. Today Google will show maps on its main search page if they're relevant to the search. Same with image search, video search, Google Groups, etc.
I'm not saying Bing (or Google) is the best search engine. These are just tools. Use whatever you want. But at least know what features exist before you badmouth another using completely invalid points.
Those who deliberately remain ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. One nice thing about being a slave under someone else's control is the fact that you not only don't have to think for yourself but you aren't responsible for much of anything either.
Do a Google Search. Click on "+Show options..." at top of page. Click on "recent results".
Google Caffeine, Google Wave and Google Chrome OS coming soon baby! Ooooooo yeah baby!
As by searching by image, Google already has that and does not need any plug in unlike MS. The majority planet has chosen
But let's be clear about the facts: Bing has had a robust image search option since day one without the need for any plugins. VisualSearch is a completely distinct feature. Let's not compare image search to visual search. These are two separate things.
And I thought prostitution was illegal. Silly me.
Let's try that again
That web page doesn't exist. Let's see if we can help you find what you are looking for.
:(
- by chapibol September 14, 2009 2:31 PM PDT
- Bing Effing Rulez!!!!!!!!!!
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