Archive for the ‘Microsoft Bing’ Category

Here at Kosmix, we try to watch new developments in search technology hawkishly. It was with great excitement, then, that I tried Bing Visual Search as soon as I heard about it.

Have you heard about it yet? Bing Visual Search was recently announced by Microsoft as a way to navigate search queries and topics that are best represented visually. For example, if you’d like to see several bird species aggregated and presented to you in a gallery format, Bing’s your guy.

After trying it, I’m happy to assure you that Visual Search is worth the root canal that is the Silverlight install (yes, Visual Search is built using Microsoft’s Silverlight, and yes, it does take five agonizing minutes to download and install on my Mac).

More importantly, once you get over the initial hump, you’ll notice that Bing does a great job of organizing categories of images into galleries (politicians, birds, entertainers, you name it). One can visualize these galleries being incorporated into the main line search results for general topic queries like “Ford Mustang models”. The gallery, in turn, would show you Mustang models by year since launch – cool, no?!

The larger point, however, remains that the entire industry is slowly but surely dipping its toes into presentation of visually rich information in search results. Here at Kosmix, we’ve always treated rich media – images, videos, even applications like BodyMaps – as first class citizens. Its nice to see our overall approach validated with the launch of apps like Visual Search.

We’ll continue to play with Bing Visual Search and post updates. Let us know if you found something interesting on there that you’d like to share!