At TechCrunch50, Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi announced a new visual search feature on Bing which returns results as an interactive gallery of images. VisualSearch is currently in beta and available to United States users only. You can still try it out by setting your preference to United States. We have tried out the new VisualSearch, and we strongly recommend you to try the VisualSearch for Travel Destinations, World Leaders, Celebrities, & Cars.
How many times have you seen a movie trailer and forgotten the name of it the next day? You go online to search for it but you can’t seem to find the movie with “what’s-his-name” in it anywhere but you can picture the actor in your head. A study conducted by Microsoft Research shows that consumers can process results with images 20% faster than text only results. So it’s clear that images play a big part in helping consumer’s with a variety of search activities.
Visual Search is a new way to formulate and refine your search queries through imagery, particularly for sets of results that tend to be more structured. We call these data groupings galleries. Simply go to www.bing.com/visualsearch and install Silverlight if you don’t have it already. What you’ll see is an amazing new visual search experience. Visual Search allows you to quickly scroll through the galleries or do a one-click refinement using the quick tabs on the left, which are specifically relevant to the type of results you are browsing through.
Now to find that movie you were looking for, click on “Movies” and scroll through the imagery to find “what’s-his-name.” Now that you found it, hover your mouse over the movie to view details including title, rating, reviews, and how much it grossed at the box office, all right under the search box. Think about how much time you saved using Visual Search.
Microsoft is having a new contest on Twitter and all you have to do is to tweet on twitter to be eligible to enter. Everyday, a winner will be selected to take home a $500 Visa cash card and a Bing backpack.
At the current moment, IE (IE6+IE7+IE8) all together holds only 54.4% of the web browser market which is a 11.4% drop since March, 2009. The majority of that lost market share was captured by Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6% market share. While this was occurring, Bing has actually increased market penetration in both the U.S. and around the world.
Today, Bing introduces Twitter postings as part of its search results. When you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. It is a very strategic & intelligent move to add twitter postings as part of Bing’s search results…
June 30, 2009, Bing advertises on NYTimes.com. As can be seen in the picture below, anyone visiting NYTimes.com will now see an ad for “Bing”. This seems like a very good decision because….
As part of Bing’s initial market rollout, Microsoft ran this ad on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone because Microsoft has allocated approximately $80 to $100 million in radio, online, TV, and print advertisement in the United States for Bing’s debut launch into the search engine market.
At the time when this ad was aired, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was averaging approximately 2 million viewers per night. What made this commercial unique is that it allowed the viewer to watch more of their favorite TV show, while still advertising their name.
