Bing Adds Visual Search Option
By Miguel Helft
In an effort to allow search users to go through large volumes of data more quickly, Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new feature on its search engine, Bing, which it calls Visual Search. The feature allows users to browse through images rather than text snippets.
Unlike image search, long a feature of most search engines, which allow users to look for images that match a keyword (Yosemite, Mona Lisa, Madonna), Visual Search is a way to use images for regular Web searches. Type in “movies” in Visual Search, and you will see thumbnails of hundreds of movie posters for current films. Bing’s navigation rail on the left of the page makes it possible to filter quickly those images by genre, Motion Picture Association rating or other criteria.