Microsoft Brings Snapshot-Powered Web Searches to iPhones
May 02 2016 - 5:32PM
Dow Jones News
By Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Microsoft Corp. updated its Bing search app for iOS on Monday
with a new feature that lets you search for images by taking a
photo with your iPhone or uploading an image from your camera roll.
Yet again, the company has built a useful, fun piece of software
for iPhones -- and not its own Windows phone operating system.
It's a simple feature that's easy and surprisingly fast. You
just open the Bing app, tap the magnifying glass icon on the app's
home screen, then tap the camera icon. Snap a photo and Bing will
return search results of similar images.
The results are solid but not perfect. In our quick test run, it
appropriately recognized Citi Field and a Star Wars storm trooper,
returning other similar images. When we loaded a picture of a dog,
it got the species and color right, but couldn't peg the breed. One
failure: A shot of a pair of shoes returned a guitar case, the back
seat of a car and a Ford logo.
A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to say whether or not Bing's
reverse image search would ever make its way to Windows phones or
Android devices.
Alphabet Inc.'s Google doesn't offer reverse image search in its
iOS search app, and it discontinued the Google Goggles
image-recognition app in 2014. It does, however, offer the feature
on the Web.
The utility of taking a picture and then searching for
look-alike or related images is an open question. You could use
this feature when you want to see something from a different angle,
or from a different time, place or other context.
Amazon.com Inc.'s use of reverse image search might be the one
that makes the most sense: In Amazon's iPhone and Android shopping
apps (and a dedicated app called Flow), you can point your camera
at objects -- paper towels, phones, books, etc.
The update to Bing for iOS follows Microsoft's release of Word
Flow, an innovative one-handed keyboard for iPhones. While iOS (and
Android) continue to thrive, Microsoft's own share of the mobile
operating system market had fallen to 1.1% by the end of last year,
according to the Gartner research firm.
Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at
Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 02, 2016 18:17 ET (22:17 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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