Online shop from Bing's image search
The search wars are an ongoing thing with plenty of advertising dollars at stake, and if you snooze, well, you lose out on the loot. To keep up with the competition -- namely, Google, the search engine that's also a verb -- Microsoft paid special attention to Bing's image search functionality and added some new features, including an online shopping feature that's currently in beta.
When you look up a product image in Bing, it will show you where you can buy what you're looking at. Expect some hiccups since it's in beta, but for now, Microsoft says it's focusing on more precisely detecting pages where you can purchase a product, adding more information for each source, and other experience improvements.
We tried to give it a test run and were met with limited success. Using the example Microsoft provided in its blog post, we were able to look up Coleman camping tents and see nine different places to buy one online when scrolling down. But when we looked up a GoPro camera and clicked on the picture, no shopping links showed up. That is, until we were more specific -- looking up a GoPro Hero 4 netted better results with links to Best Buy, B&H Photo, Ebay, and half a dozen lesser known sites.
Scrolling is the key to the enhanced image search. In addition to buy links, you'll find related searches based on the image, Pinterest collections, more sizes of the image from across the web, and pages with the image where you might be able to obtain more information.
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