Monday, September 14, 2009

Visual Search Launched by Bing (Bing.com/VisualSearch)

Microsoft's search engine Bing has launched a visual search. The visual search presents you with a grid of pictures to select from instead of the standard list of links with brief text under it. You can try it for yourself at Bing.com/VisualSearch. Note that you have to download Silverlight to try visual search.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10351491-250.html

"The Visual Search feature showcases the real value of having a search engine that blends structured data into its results. Google has structured data, too. (Try searching for the title of a movie that's currently playing in theaters). But Bing pushes it further. In travel, sports, and product reviews, for example, Bing is extremely aggressive in displaying structured data. Bing also has Powerset technology (it acquired the company in 2008) for analyzing Wikipedia content.


But as with Wolfram Alpha, Bing's visual and textual filters don't work for the offbeat and weird, for a query that's not phrased just right to be picked up by the structured query engine, or for what people might consider ordinary little searches. Type in a less mainstream query, and you're skimming a sea of indexed text from Web pages, not structured data. Bing is still a good general-purpose search engine, mind you, but it does not beat Google as the king of the long tail.

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