The Microsoft search engine Bing has recently begun to promote it’s new Visual Search service. Offering a fresh and useful alternative to Google’s image search feature, it blends both small amounts of descriptive text with a comprehensive image bank.
There are obvious advantages to searching by image, which may not seem clear until you actually use this new tool. The example that Bing offers on the landing page for Visual Search is a restaurant search for London, Edinburgh and Manchester. By clicking into a set of results, you not only find a series of options, but can also see the interior decor of the business. In the restaurant trade this is a selling point- for other businesses it won’t be so important.
The image results are then assigned attributes, which can be used like a normal filtering system to get better results. Google are apparantly close to launching a more complex but user friendly visual search of their own.