Bing – Visual Search
ArchieIndian Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
BING! I am sure each one of us has noticed, if not tried, its latest offering – the visual search . Its Microsoft’s tribute to the Chinese proverb ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’. It took a long time for us to review the Visual Search thing, but here it goes. We have something to say about Bing Visual search which is expected to be available at http://www.bing.com/visualsearch, sometime soon. At present, all you get to see is a disappointing error page. 
This has been happening right since the day Bing declared Visual Search, live, during its presentation. I tried it a couple of times before I finally tweeted to the Bing team about the same. No surprises from Microsoft again.!! It took them over a week to respond, mentioning the problem. All that I needed to do was change m
y country preference in Bing to US. To cut the long story short, Bing Visual Search has been released in the US only. You can change your country preference by clicking on the country name on the Bing Homepage.
It was only so far that I had to go to get the Bing Visual Search to work. However, for me it was one step further. I was on Linux and Bing Visual Search needs Silverlight installed as a pre-requisite. I found a developmental release for the same but couldn’t get it to work quickly enough. So, I switched to my brother’s machine, to write about Bing. This happened to be a Windows Machine with Silverlight installed.
After successfully crossing all hurdles, I was ready to dissect Microsoft’s answer to Google. 
Time to check out Bing Visual Search then. So I thought of visually searching Laptop only to realize that I couldn’t. Right now only, a limited no of featured galleries are provided by Visual Search Galleries Beta. Not allowing this setback to bog me down, I went on to search for Digital Cameras . Voila! The Bing team gets its first round of applause from the people who were around me for providing a Visual Treat in their Visual Search.
The results were pretty impressive with a number of links like, “most popular on Bing”, “highest megapixel” on the left hand side of the page. Filters like “megapixel”, “optical zoom”, brand etc are extremely useful additions to a search engine, atleast usability wise. At the end of it all you do get your prized camera, with its pricing, reviews and related information, all under one roof.
So Whats the verdict?
First the pros :
- A Visual treat to say the least. You will get to hear at-least a couple of wows if you check it out in a group of three.
- The concept is brilliant. Microsoft is not attacking Google in its forte, it seems. They are trying to provide a better overall searching experience. And should this be added here – Bing is the fastest growing search engine.
- Getting so much information about the camera of your choice stacked together is a nice experience.
Now the cons :
- Available only for the US. You need to change your country of preference to US.
- Limited number of galleries. Bing needs to add up a lot more galleries very soon, else someone like me will consider it a one time visual experience.
- Comparison between two products, which come up in the same search result, didn’t seem possible. A suggestion from my side to the Bing team.
- SilverLight for Linux ( A demand from my side).
- Sometimes Bing Visual Search seems like the product comparison sites with a few extra features added and a couple of existing features removed.
Overall, for me Bing Visual Search is a breath of fresh air in a Google dominated search industry. Good competition may mean better search experience for people like us.
Finally, the microreviews team wishes the Bing Team the very best in its future endeavours. Hope you guys take Visual search to the next level, where, for atleast a certain number of search based tasks Bing is the first name.
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Tags: Bing, bing visual search, bing visual search only for US, bing vs google, google, how to use bing visual search, visual search
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Vikash
