Bing Introduces Visual Search

It’s a pretty simple concept and one that various search engine developers have been experimenting with for several years: Can users make a successful search using images instead of plain text? While we’ve seen various search engines attempt something like this, either with product images or snapshots of websites, we’ve not seen something quite as large scale or interesting as Microsoft’s attempt to integrate a visual search into Bing.

Bing accounts for around 6% of all internet searches in the UK, although it’s performing over twice as well in the US where Microsoft has invested serious amounts of money into marketing for the search engine, which could become the first serious rival to Google since the search engine took the global search crown.

On their Bing blog Microsoft have announced that visual search allows users to find what they are looking for 20% faster than using standard text links, stating that it’s clear “images play a big part in helping consumers with a variety of search activities.” – Something the popularity of Google’s Image search proved long ago.

While we’re not really sure about Microsoft’s numbers and we’re not terribly impressed that you have to install Silverlight before you can use the function, the visual search feature is certainly an interesting an idea and one we can see catching on the in the future, at least for certain types of searches. It’s unlikely that visual searching will ever replace a standard text search in the vast majority of cases but it could be something we see used more and more to supplement standard searches in the future.

It’s also a great reason to make sure all of your images and image tags are set up for maximum SEO potential.

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