Bing gets visual with Visual Search

It might still be too early to tell how Bing’s new rich-media search feature will affect marketers and their ability to be found online.

However, it’s gone live and it’s working. The new Bing Visual Search feature that displays search results in a grid-like image gallery instead of the traditional list of search results, was announced yesterday at the TechCrunch50.

What’s the concept behind Bing’s Visual Search?

To display simple, clear imagery to help users sort through lots of data easily. Of course you might agree that certain categories of search might find this more useful than others. So far Bing has only launched the new feature in beta (bing.com/visualsearch) which only works for a particular set of categories: cars, animals, people and products.

As explained on Search Engine Land, users must have Silverlight installed on their browsers to fully experience Visual Search. Also, statistics from Rich Internet Application show that nearly 73% of users have Silverlight and its adoption has been growing fairly quickly since NBCOlympics.com relied upon Silverlight for live streaming and on-demand video coverage during Beijing 2008.

The newly launched feature only works for 50 different categories and it is said Microsoft will be adding a new category every month according to what they believe is a popular search result.

So how do you get your product out in the grid-like image gallery?

AdvertisingAge explained Microsoft gets the information from data providers like Zappos or PC World, for digital-camera information, for example.

‘Thus, to make sure your merchandise pops up in Bing’s galleries, make sure you’re present in the feed of more than one industry heavyweight.’

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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