Microsoft announced it is bringing some improvements to Bing image search to offer additional functionality beyond just helping users find photos.
After searching for and clicking on a photo in Bing, users will be presented with addition options. This includes the option to view higher res versions of the image, or to visit a product page to buy what’s featured in the image.
Another useful new feature is that Bing will display descriptions of whatever happens to be featured in the image:
“Want to know more about a historical figure? Or learn an interesting fact about an insect? These descriptions and links will help you learn more about a wide variety of subjects. The quality of the descriptions and the number of images with one will improve significantly over time.”
I tested it by searching for “Las Vegas hotels” and clicking on an image of the Bellagio. Bing pulled in a description from a Nevada tourism website, links to related searches, and links to other pages where the image is featured. The design of the image search results has also been slightly tweaked and looks cleaner.
A complete list of new things you’ll see in Bing image search are as follows:
- Places to buy the product in the image
- Related searches based on the image
- Pinterest collections with the image
- More sizes of the image
- Pages with the image
Altogether, these new features are designed to help users learn more about what they find in image search. For site owners, this may be an opportunity to get a few more clicks from Bing search.
If you own an e-commerce site and want to make sure your product pages are featured in relevant Bing image searches, the company offers the following advice:
“If you run a shopping site and you notice that your site isn’t surfacing or would like richer information to surface, please check out this post which details the site tags we support, how we may use the information in ranking, and additional opportunities to work together to help our customers find your site to complete their task.”
Bing’s new image search has been rolled out worldwide on desktop, and will be available “in the coming weeks” on Bing’s iPhone and Android apps.
