While the US has had Bing’s Visual Search feature for some time now, its finally Australia’s turn to get the AJAXY goodness. Clicking on a Category, users are presented with a visual thumbnail view of data. Initial launch categories include:
· Popular celebrities
· Recipes
· Cricket players
· Tennis players
· Melbourne restaurants
· Sydney restaurants
· Top iPhone apps
· Top Twitter users
· Top Windows Phone 7 apps
· Travel destinations
· World beaches
· World leaders
· Australian prime ministers
· Dog breeds
· Bing home page images
· Cocktails
Once your inside a category, you can filter the content instantly with the filters on the left hand side of the page. Take Cricket Players for example, filtering based on their country ‘Australia’ will show only our stars.
The whole visual search system works really well for those categories that exist, the challenge now for Bing is to continue to add more and more categories. Providing quick access to information we care about is the name of the game here.
