Two new features announced this month by Microsoft and Google are making searching the Internet more colorful.
We’re looking at media reaction to the new visual search features and the future of visual search. We’ve got perspectives from Boston.com, CNET, BNET, The New York Times, PCWorld, CNBC and Shelly Palmer.
Let’s take a look at the new search engines in this video from the Boston Globe.
“The first one is from Google. It’s called Fast Flip and what makes this interesting, it’s a way to look at Google news without having to look at all that nasty text. It takes about 35 different news sources here and you can actually flip through the headlines from each of them.”
“Microsoft has launched the new visual search for Bing. Their search engine now has about 10 percent of the marketplace. What you can do with visual search with Bing is instead of it going through and giving you a list of text stories, it gives you images for each of the stories and then you can flip through those."
Bloggers on CNet.com and BNet.com share their criticisms of Bing’s visual search engine.
“Bing's visual and textual filters don't work for the offbeat and weird, for a query that's not phrased just right to be picked up by the structured query engine.”
“What Microsoft seems to be doing is marrying a topic or search term with an image that is an example of the term...any image could fall into numerous positions of any taxonomy.”
According to the New York Times and blogger Shelly Palmer, Google’s Fast Flip isn’t picture-perfect either.
Their reports suggest approaching the tool, which shares revenue made from ads placed around the articles, with caution.
“Some of the publishers said they viewed the experiment with caution, adding that no single solution could address the industry’s main problem: plunging advertising revenues.”
“Will this new format save the newspaper business? Absolutely not but it is a really nice interface for reading news and the ads pop the way print ads do.”
PC World and CNBC quote both Google and Microsoft, who recognize the room for improvement.
"We know that Google Fast Flip isn't perfect…But we think there are some interesting ideas behind it.”
“It’s a long game for us. We should just be clear about that.”
Still, MSNBC reports that Microsoft expects visual searches to be the look of the future.
“Much more easy to visually look at a whole series of photos and visually pick things out. We’ve done a bunch of research that shows people can find what they’re looking for 40 percent faster with pictures.”
But bloggers from The New York Times and PC World question their utility.
“How useful or popular the feature will be is not clear. But if nothing else, it suggests that Microsoft’s Bing team has stepped up the pace of innovation as it tries to compete with Google.”
“I like the blue links, because they mean something. You can read a bit of text or a headline, and almost always understand what's being said. Not so with a photograph.”
What do you think about the new visual tools on Bing and Google? Do you think images will replace text results in search engines?
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