Bing's Visual Search: ideal for great-with-faces, bad-with-names types
Today, Microsoft got me to think differently about search.
Until now, I really hadn't had much reason to switch to its Bing decision engine, which launched back in May, for my Web searching needs. Google was doing just fine. For a while, I was making an effort to use Yahoo but Google somehow always became the default.
But now, with today's release of Visual Search for Bing at the TechCrunch50 conference, Microsoft may have given me reason to change some of my personal defaults. (Techmeme)
Also see: Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft Bing gets visual search; full 2.0 update later this fall
Until I started scrolling through the images on Bing's beta page, I hadn't realized that there were so many uncaptioned images in my head. Take celebrities, for example. I'm great with faces but horrible with names. Give me a lineup of faces and I'll spot the right one. And, better yet, give me the tools needed to filter the face by gender, age, type of celebrity (actor, athlete, musician, etc.) and now we're talking a top-notch user experience.
Visual Search needs Microsoft's Silverlight to run, so this could also be a nice way to beef up the number of Silverlight installs out there. And it would be worth it. Visual Search is just in beta now but some of the categories stood out and made me think of possible ideas that Microsoft may have up its sleeve with visual search. Among those categories: handbags, cars and dogs.
A lot of women I know are ga-ga over purses, my wife included. (Personally, I don't get it, but that's for a different blog.) She can describe one to a friend with great detail and will see it on someone's shoulder across a crowded store. Unlike celebrities, landmarks or yoga poses (yes, they're there), these are the sort of things you embed into your memory because you may be thinking about owning one someday. I know I think of that with some cars I see. And I know my wife can do the same with purses.
I'm anxious to see what Microsoft has in the works for the coming months and, believe it or not, I'm getting some kind of warm, fuzzy feeling about Microsoft and Visual Search and the future of search, in general. Regular readers will tell you that it's not often that I say that about Microsoft.