Glacier National Park Photo: Dave Sizer/Creative Commons
People discover and explore billions of images every month using Bing Image Search. As we analyzed how people discover images on Bing, talked to Bing customers, and studied the different ways we interact with visual information today, we saw an opportunity to put images at the heart of search.
In studying image search behavior, we saw that, fundamentally, the image may not be the destination, but rather, the starting point for something more.
Do more with image search
Now when you are searching images and have clicked a picture, you can scroll or swipe up to get useful and interesting information to help you learn more, redirect your search, or get help connecting the dots to get your task done — whether that’s buying something that caught your eye, learning more about a historical figure, or finding out where in nature you can see that stunning landscape.
After you scroll, where available, we will show you:
- Places to buy the product in the image (beta). For some product images, we will show you where to buy the item. This feature is still in beta but is the first peek into the types of things we could enable our customers to do with image searches. We’re focused on more precisely detecting pages where you can purchase a product, adding more information for each source, and many other experience improvements. 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.
- Related searches based on the image to help you discover more images like the one you found.
- Pinterest collections with this image to help you locate other images pinned by people who also loved and pinned this one. We’re starting with Pinterest but plan on expanding out to other sites over time.
- More sizes of the image available from across the web.
- Pages with this image where you may be able to find more information or take actions related to the image. If the image is of food, one of these pages might contain a recipe. If the image is a location, the page may have more travel information.
By connecting the dots between the image, where it’s found online, the content of the page or the image itself, and the rich entities and relationships in the Bing index, we can make image searches a richer, more active experience.
Learn more
Have you ever found a beautiful nature photograph while exploring images and struggled to find out more about it, perhaps to plan a visit or buy a poster of the scenery?
Even before you scroll down, in the middle of the bottom bar, you’ll now see the most relevant description of the image that we can find on the web to help you learn more about it.
The search in the screenshot above was for “national parks” but the description tells you the name of the park, some interesting facts about it with links to search for more and a link to the webpage with the description. Check it out here.
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.
Be inspired
In the new image-search experience, when you click on an image, you’ll see a view that is redesigned but still familiar. It’s cleaner and focused on what you are searching for.
You’ll still find related searches, the source page and image metadata, plus the actions you love such as Pin It or reviewing results through a slideshow, along with some new actions and information.
We’ve also updated our mobile experience by overlaying the information we previously showed below the image.
Rodrigo Galindez/Creative Commons
We include a reminder to use images responsibly with more helpful information you can review here. Over time we may begin to show specific license information for images, when that information is available.
If you’re a site owner and want to learn more about being part of the Bing image search ecosystem, please take a look at this post, containing information for site owners and contact information for further questions.
When and where will this be released?
The experience will be rolling out worldwide to bing.com on PCs, tablets and smartphones as well as our iPhone and Android apps over the coming weeks. Once released, you can try it by clicking on any image.
We have also released a Chrome extension that brings the new Bing image search information directly into the web pages you browse. Click here to learn more and download the extension.
This is the next step in our quest to uncover the wealth of data behind every image so that you can be inspired, learn more and do more with image search.
Please visit Bing Listens to find additional tips and tricks regarding this update. And if you’d like to help us improve the experience, please submit feedback on the bottom right of any image results page on Bing. We’ll be keeping an eye out.
Welcome to your new image search experience.
– The Bing Image Search Team