Microsoft Bing Visual Search Uses Images Instead Of Text

Microsoft Corporation is constantly researching ways to improve search. At the TechCrunch50 event earlier today, Microsoft gave a demo of Visual Search on Bing.com. The Visual Search engine uses images instead of text. The images are arranged by categories and various other parameters.

As of right now Visual Search is just an index of photo albums tagged with certain parameters. For example when I selected the Digital Cameras category, Bing showed me a bunch of cameras that I could click on. Then I narrowed the results to between 5 and 10 megapixels and the cameras out of those parameters disappeared. Nothing really new there. I’ve seen this technology before on e-commerce websites like eBay.

I’m just going to label this announcement as a “meh” since I’ve seen it before. Image searches have longer load times than text especially in countries with slow Internet connections. The Visual Search requires Microsoft Silverlight too.

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