Bing Travel goes natural, Bing Images gets Visual Search-style revamp

The Bing team posted on their blog today announcing a new feature update for Bing Travel – the addition of natural language search. When you type in a query such as “Flights from Boston to Los Angeles in June”, Bing will automatically fill in the flight search forms with the parameters you need. You no longer have to manually select your airport, destination, dates or other options to conduct a flight search. Here’s a screenshot of what you’ll get when you enter the query example before:

Bing Travel

You can use a number of different combinations in your natural language query including airline names, number of stops or time of year, and Bing will do the job for you.

Next up we have Bing Images also receiving an update. Thanks to a tip from Pradeep, some lucky users noticed that Bing Images have been updated and given the “Visual Search”-style treatment. Take a look at the video below to see what we mean:

Bing Images update. Credits to liquidboy2007 for the video (with LiveSide open as one of his tabs!).

What we’re not sure is whether this new interface is Silverlight-based or entirely written in HTML5. Update: We have confirmed that this new interface doesn’t use Silverlight at all. Remember that Bing showed off their new HTML5 user interface back in September and one of the demo was that Visual Search does not require Silverlight anymore. We expect that the Bing team will be announcing something big really soon. Stay tuned at LiveSide for more information!

Comments

  • Anonymous

    Yep, I spotted the refreshed image search earlier. I think it’s a horrible change. I liked the clean layout before with no ugly borders around each image. Plus they dropped a feature where given a specific image, Bing can point to you various sizes (resolutions) of the same image around the web so you didn’t have to keep on hunting yourself.

    • Damaster – LiveSide.net

      I’ve also noticed that they’ve dropped the “Find more sizes” feature in the new version. It was a nice feature and I certainly hope they’d bring it back.

  • john

    Will this feature also be over two months late like the Bing html5 preview?

    • Damaster – LiveSide.net

      The Bing Travel feature is already available to all (U.S. only again). The Bing Images revamp is showing up for the lucky few individuals.

  • Revolutions

    A long time ago, they had said the HTML5 update was coming within a month to a preview site. It never did. Liveside posted a link to a preview site, but I never was able to get the link to work, either.

    Their post:
    http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2010/09/15/bing-previews-a-more-beautiful-search-experience-in-ie9.aspx
    Quote: “The features we previewed today can be experienced on a preview site we’ll make available later this month at that time you’ll be able to experience what we previewed in San Francisco and maybe even a few more surprises.”

    I have been waiting for the HTML5 update for a long time now. I just hope they get it out soon.

    • http://twitter.com/stefanweitz stefanweitz

      Stefan from Bing here – I know. You all want to see the HTML5 work. Trust me – we’re working on it. We just want to make sure it’s awesome for you all so we’re taking a little more time before we unleash it. But you will like it – more than we showed initially. Thanks for your patience.

      • Revolutions

        Thank you. You do not know what it is like to hope for a product or an update, and be unable to find any news or blog post related to it. After that one blog post, the whole idea sort of disappeared. Everywhere I looked I found nothing. I’m glad you’re still working on it.

        However, I do have one more question: What happened to Bing reference and Wikipedia on Bing? I used those features often, and again–I am unable to find any news related to them. Did you remove them? Or are you aiming to release something similar again at a later time?

        Thanks!