Better App Browsing Experience at Bing’s Visual Search

Monday, September 21, 2009

Microsoft may have finally beaten Apple, in Apple’s own department of iPhone app browsing. Powered by Microsoft Silverlight technology, Bing’s new Visual Search engine allows users to search a category via images. Silverlight technology, when applied to visual search, provides a visually entertaining, and interactive experience. Included with Bing’s visual search launch is a category for top iPhone apps. Bing Visual Search for iPhone apps provides an experience that may make iTune’s App Store users wonder, “hey, why isn’t our App Store more like that?”

Indeed, compared to the bland App Store on iTunes, Bing Visual Search for iPhone Apps has arguably a better and more engaging user interface for exploring the thousands of iPhone apps. Bing Visual Search users can visually browse through the top 500 apps, sorting them by popularity, price, release date, and by name. When the cursor is pointed to an icon, the price, category, rank, and release date for the app will be shown. However, don’t expect Bing to take you to the App Store when clicking on the icon. Clicking on it will take users to Bing’s search result on that app. Users can further narrow the displaying app to publisher, price range, and app category in Bing’s visual search menu. However, currently it is only categorizing the apps from the top 500 apps. Thus, only 2 apps are displayed when selecting the business app category. Furthermore, the Bing top iPhone apps visual search page does not seem to be regularly updating their app rankings. Current popularity rankings reflect those of past week.

Despite the lack of depth with Bing’s iPhone app visual search, Microsoft has demonstrated to Apple on how the App Store should have been done. Perhaps Apple will learn from Microsoft, and bring a Bing Visual Search-like experience to the App Store in the near future.

Via The App Machine under Bing App Browsing