Bing it on and Flip out
For you folks that need to see a picture, Bing has just the thing, visual
search.
http://www.bing.com/
Want to find information on dogs? Click on the beagle. Looking for
politicians? Click the mug of President Obama. Yoga poses? You guessed it.
Click on the picture of the stretching body.
You'll need Silverlight, a Web graphics-viewing program from Microsoft
Corp., to see visual search at work. Don't worry, the prompts on the site
make downloading and installing a breeze.
My only question: Why does "E.T." get the marquee position for the
"greatest movies" icon?
Meanwhile, Google is experimenting with presenting news and information to
browsers in magazine page-flipping style. The feature is called Fast Flip,
but the folks at Google have elected to keep it hidden from their visitors.
I had to do a Google search to find it here:
http://fastflip.googlelabs.
The idea is simple. A page of a site, usually one featuring a story or
single item, is shown to visitors. Large scroll arrows appear on the sides
of the rows of pages, letting people flip through the pages as if they were
looking at pages of a magazine. If you see something of interest within a
page, clicks take you directly to the full Web site.
Fast Flip participants include BBC, The New York Times, Seventeen, Slate,
The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post and others.
Participating publications/Web sites are sharing in the Google contextual
advertising revenue generated by Fast Flip.
