Invite colleagues
So for those of us watching the search market, recent time has seen flurries of activity from the major players. This week we see the announcement on TechCrunch the news of Microsoft's new “Visual Search“, a beta approach to search engine use on Bing. This new feature makes it possible to explore topics in data groupings galleries. According to reports on the Bing community blog, Microsoft opted for the new approach after researchers found that consumers can process results with images 20% faster than text only results. This is a figure getting a lot of mileage on search marketing blogs... I am looking forward to a more independent source to validate... nevertheless, faster is faster....
Visual Search, online at www.bing.com/visualsearch, requires users to and install Microsoft’s Silverlight web application framework and to choose USA as country at the top of the screen. Current visual searches in the Gallery feature entertainment, personalities, sport, reference and shopping, each with several layers of refinement. Movies in the Theater, for example, can be viewed in terms of top weekend box office, opening this week, Metacritic’s top rated, action, comedy and drama, and narrowed by MPAA rating, genre and 3D.
The only downside to this was when I tried to access the new product in China I got "That web page doesn't exist." so as mentioned above don't forget to change your country setting to try this out.
Post a comment below and tell us what you think.
Written on Friday, 18 September 2009 16:31 by Matt McDougall
