Visual Search from Google and Bing
Google and Bing have both announced new “visual search” tools for their respective search engines. The announcements were made at TechCrunch 50, a San Francisco-based startup that both are sponsoring.
So what is “visual search” and why should you care?
Visual Search is an approach to display results from a search engine query in a visual, image-oriented way as an alternative to text-based information. The idea is that a visual representation will allow users to more quickly locate what they are looking for.
Bing’s offering is in Beta. You can play around with Bing’s visual search by clicking here. You’ll see categories of information displayed as images. Click on the Movies in Theaters image and you’ll get taken to a page that displays the current movies as images. I noticed that some of the movies were displaying as a blank image. Rolling over these or any of the images puts the title of the movie the search box so you can just click to get information about the movie.
Google’s offering is called Fast Flip. The idea here is to give users faster access to news. Google’s blog says that Fast Flip is an experiment where people can combine traditional print reading with online article reading to achieve a new and enhanced reading experience.
Trying to emulate the way people read printed magazines or newspapers, Fast Flip lets users browse through multiple pages quickly and instantly. Information is sorted and presented to users by their level of popularity, topic, and source. In other words, a user can use filters to display only news from one or multiple sources. Also, filters can be used to display information about certain topics.
Click here to check out Fast Flip for yourself. Or click here to see a short YouTube  presentation about it.
Neither of these offerings have yet made it to the main  Google or Bing sites. They are experiments, however, I believe this approach is opening the door to new, more visually interactive approaches to searching and so is worth watching.
2 Comments
December 8th, 2009 at 4:58 am
i am using both Bing and Google and i think both search engines give relevant search results. i would still prefer Google though, because it gives a little bit more relevant search results than Bing.
January 9th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
i am a user of Microsofts BING search engine and it is as good as google for static webpage search. for searching blogs, i think google gives more relevant search results compared bing.