“Why type when you can see it?” is Bing’s promotional slogan for its new feature, launched around September last year.According to Bing’s blog, Visual Search is still in beta, and hence is currently only available in the US. The company plans to introduce it in other markets slowly as they go about refining the feature.
“How many times have you seen a movie trailer and forgotten the name of it the next day? You go online to search for it but you can’t seem to find the movie with ‘what’s-his-name’ in it anywhere but you can picture the actor in your head,” says Todd Schwartz from Bing. Very true; it does happen a lot of times.
The new Bing Visual Search is very simple and user-friendly. The bing.com/visualsearch lets a user search from a grid of images, laid out in rows, as per individual categories. You can search entertainment, famous people, reference, shopping, sports and travel. These categories are further divided into sub-categories, for instance, you can browse the entertainment category by top albums, academy awards, greatest movies, popular DVD’s, film legends and Billboard’s all time top songs. Similarly you can browse the link for famous people by U.S. politicians, U.S. presidents, film legends (again), world leaders and FBI’s most wanted.
As you go deeper and deeper into the website, the search becomes narrower. The reference link for example will take you to its subcategories, like animals, education, finance, etc. The animal link will further take you into dog breeds, and you can browse from rows of dog pictures of various breeds. A side bar on the website further has tabs such as toy dogs, most popular on Bing, hypoallergenic, terriers, most obedient, most intelligent, and ancient breeds. When you click on these tabs, the pictures are instantly sorted out and realigned as per your preference. You can further narrow it down to place of origin, group, size, exercise needs, temperament, coat length, grooming needs and lifespan.
All in all Visual Search is a wonderful website and lets you search for things in a more lively way, rather than just clicking on a few textual links and then finding whatever you are searching for on your own. This site is especially helpful while searching for gadgets or famous personalities and movies and other things, of which you can’t remember the names.