Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Last week bing released Visual Search, a new feature of its relatively new search engine. Instead of traditional query searches, where you type in a term to find information, with Visual Search, you look at pictures to find information.

Visual Search allows you to browse such categories as “dog breeds,” “NFL players,” and “Film Legends.” The categories can be further broken down by the subcategories on the left of the page.

During a couple of trials, it took a second or two for all of the images to load, and in many cases, not all pictures loaded, but this is an interesting way to browse information, especially if you don’t know, in words, what you need but can recognize it in pictures. Note that you need Silverlight to use bing’s Visual Search.

“Top Songs” took me to a list of album covers, “Popular TV Shows” to a page of head & cast shots, and “US States” showed me a page of landmarks. “Dog Breeds” showed me pictures of selected breeds of dogs. I found this useful when trying to figure out the breed of my mutt Jack. Hovering over a breed fills the query box with the name of the breed. Clicking to search brought up a results page identical to the results of a keyword search in bing.

Browsing by images is definitely not traditional searching, which fits with bing’s branding as a “decision engine” instead of a search engine. I’ll probably use Visual Search when I’m “fun searching,” like trying to find Jack’s breed — who I’ve decided is a Border Mutt — but when I know what I”m looking for, I’ll most likely stick with query or keyword searching. After all, the second step of bing’s visual search still relies on the query.

– Stacey Morgan Smith