Features like Bing’s Visual Search and Google Fast Flip, which is designed to replicate the experience of flipping through the pages of a newspaper or magazine, are supposed to be improving the traditional search engine. Searching with images is meant to help us find what we want faster. But I think these tools are doing more harm than good; all I see is a mess of useless features that bring more confusion into the search process—not less.
Bing 2.0
Microsoft employees were given a sneak peak at the new Bing features last week, and many of them were tweeting wildly about what Bing had in store for the public. Monday, the rest of us were introduced to Bing’s Visual Search. Powered by Microsoft’s video plugin, Silverlight, Visual Search is supposed to help you “winnow your search down fast.” But all I found was a frustrating mess of images that, more often than not, meant almost nothing to me. [read]
