Bing’s Visual Search – Now Search Information Graphically!
Do you ever feel if the fight between Proprietary software or Freeware will ever end? I guess not. Similar is the case between Google and Microsoft’s Bing. Bing has been introducing various new features to lure the web searchers towards them from time to time and Visual Search is no different.
Now, the search engines would no longer be providing just the textual information, you are looking for but are more enticed to searching information graphically and Bing’s new Visual Search can take searching to a very new level. Looks like the fight between Google and Microsoft is helping the consumers.
What is Visual Search?
As the Bing’s blogs mentions “Visual Search is a new way to formulate and refine your search queries through imagery, particularly for sets of results that tend to be more structured. It allows you to quickly scroll through the galleries or do a one-click refinement using the quick tabs on the left, which are specifically relevant to the type of results you are browsing through.”
So, isn’t this something similar to Google Squared Labs?
Well the Answer is Yes, it is a a bit similar.
What we did in Squared was to look for a particular item, say ‘Cars’ and a list of cars with images, price and features popped in. Bing’s Visual Search is almost similar but because Microsoft has built the interface with images all around and refining the results based on attributes, it looks better than squared.
As of now, the feature is avalaible only in US @ http://www.bing.com/visualsearch. Powered by Silverlight, presently there are over 50 categories like Digi cams, Dog Breeds, popular TV Shoes, US Politicians, NBA, NHL, NFL, Music etc. but the list is ought to increase from time to time.
How does it Work??
When you are searching for a particular category, all thumbnails that do not match your query disappears and the rest re-shuffle. Then further on the basis of their attibutes, they refine and process continues. The core aspect of Visual Search was structures data because of which they had specific categories or else it again would have been like a simple text to image search.
As is the case with Wolfram Alpha, Bing’s Visual Search wont work for unphrased query because the Structured Query Engine wont be able to pick it up. But anyways, it will work well for phrased and less mainstream queries.
Since, the feature is still in the beta stage, its working only in US and with very less categories as well as less number of results under the queries, Visual Search is going to take some time to really compete against Google Images or Squared Labs, which are working just fine. Clearly, Visual Search is a competitor to the Google Images and Bing is trying their best to kick off Google but the problem is not with the quality of Bing but with the fact that Google still Works!! Isnt it??
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