Today saw the launch of two new exciting search engine features; Bing Visual Search (beta in US only for now) and Google Fast Flip. So what cool new features hide behind those names and what shows the most promise for online marketers?
Google Fast Flip is Googles take on transferring the physical experience of flipping through a printed paper or magazine. It does so by showing each online article as a thumbnail and lets you flip between individual articles by clicking a chevron. It loads fast and renders nicely. Depending on the length of the article it does however not always show the full text, but instead you have to click on the article to visit its website. On the Fast Flip homepage you can select to browse through popularity, sections, topics, or source from the selected partners such as the New York Times. And as expected you can of course also search for articles. This is a trial where the news papers and Google work on a revenue share of the contextual advertising.
My view: Google Fast Flip is a quite neat feature that initially is a more exciting way of browsing various news sources, compared to just seeing headlines as per your typical news aggregator. Depending on the outcome of this trial I can alternatively see this work very well together with Googles suggested micropayment system to first give people a taste of the article content.
Google Fast Flip homepage
Bing Visual Search is currently only open for US audience, but it’s easy to change your location to give it a test run. As you probably guessed, the USP of Visual Search is that it lets you visually search for things. You can for example visually browse through the Billboard 100 music chart, check out the latest cars, gadgets and hottest sports stars celebrities and more.
My view: The first obvious drawback is that you need to have Microsoft Silverlight installed. But after getting around that little niggle, Bing Visual Search is quite an interesting proposition. As I see it the main appeal with visual search is it’s “browsability“, i.e. you don’t have to know exactly what you are looking for until you find it. I can see this feature add more interaction time with Bing, which can only be a good thing for the brand.
Bing Visual Search Billboard 100
My Conclusion: These are two very different propositions, but with the visual aspect in common. They are both trying to make online browsing a little bit more intuitive and exciting. From a marketers point of view I think Bing Visual Search will have more general appeal and be an important aspect for search optimisation whereas Google Fast Flip has the potential to make a real impact in the world of struggling news papers.
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