The other day, I had an image in my mind of a strange object and I wanted to find a picture of it online. The only problem was I didn’t have a clue what it was called. The image in my head was of a scene in “Superman II” when General Zod’s henchman Non is in the Oval Office and he’s staring intently at something. It’s five metal balls tied to strings in a row and the ones on either end keep hitting the four still balls, causing the ball on the other end to bounce away and come back again.
Maybe you already know what I’m talking about.
I turned to one of my coworkers here at eHarbor, Inc. and asked her to help me. She could picture it, as well, but she couldn’t put her finger on the name. I tried searching for “metal ball attached to strings hitting each other” on Google, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. Luckily, my resourceful coworker found it on Amazon.com, I believe. I could now put a name to an image – Newton’s cradle!
This story illustrates my need for a visual search engine and not simply a text-based one. Luckily, Microsoft and Google are both heading in that direction. I read about their efforts in a CNN article entitled, “Microsoft, Google expand search-engine tools.”
None of the Bing Visual Search galleries look like they would help me find Newton’s cradle because they mostly include people, entertainment and electronics. But it’s new, so I’m willing to cut Microsoft some slack. I’m sure they will get better as they get a feel for what people are (literally) looking for.
Microsoft is still trying hard to break Google’s domination of the search-engine market. The CNN article cited a comScore study showing that, in June, about 65 percent of online searches were done through Google, while just 8.4 percent were done through Bing.
I’ve talked about the race between Microsoft and Google to develop a stronghold over a variety of online and software industries before. You can read about it in my blog entry, “Google-Microsoft face-off good for ecommerce.” Their rivalry is bringing great innovations like these visual search engines. I’ll hopefully talk more about Google’s Fast Flip in a forthcoming blog entry. For now, I’ll say adieu.
This internet marketing article was originally posted at submitsolution.com