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Microsoft displaying movable images in searches
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 15 September 2009, 15:27 IST |
1 Comments
Bangalore: To differentiate its search engine Bing from Google, Microsoft is trying to display some search results as galleries of moveable images instead of text links.
Bing's new visual search page lets people flip through pictures to track down where and when a movie is playing, read up on baseball players or shop for items like digital cameras.
Microsoft has used Silverlight, its technology for making sophisticated websites with lots of content and moving parts, to build the visual search program. But in its current form, it's something of a throwback to the days when organizing the web was done by humans, not powerful computer algorithms. For example, Yahoo began as a curated directory of web pages, but as the internet evolved, so did methods of automatically indexing material. Google's mastery of powerful algorithms pushed it to the front of the pack.
For its new feature, Microsoft has picked about 50 categories and worked with outside companies, including shopping sites, to pull in the necessary pictures and descriptions. Microsoft launched Bing in May, promoting it as an improvement over Google-style '10 blue links' for tasks like shopping and travel. According to the Nielsen, in the month of August, Microsoft's share of U.S. searches rose to 10.7 percent from nine percent in July. Google executed 64.6 percent of U.S. searches in August, while Yahoo, the No. 2, was used for 16 percent.
Bing's new visual searching feature was unveiled on Monday at a conference staged by the TechCrunch news blog in San Francisco.
