Just a few days ago we told you about a new partnership between Microsoft and Getty Images that stemmed from a legal case involving the improper use of Getty Images in Microsoft’s Bing Image Widget.
It seems that the new features announced yesterday by the Bing team not only enhance the ability to discover and use images in Bing but also make sure users fully understand where an image comes from and remind them about responsibly using it. Eventually Bing will add licensing info on images when it is available. That last small but very important detail is what caused the court case with Getty in the first place as they sued Microsoft for copyright infringement by allowing users to display unlicensed images using the Bing Image Widget.
This next step in Bings' image evolution, which will be rolling out to Bing.com users on all devices and apps over the next few weeks, includes several new features that will show up as you scroll through images.
- Places to buy the product in the image (beta). For some product images, we will show you where to buy the item. This feature is still in beta but is the first peek into the types of things we could enable our customers to do with image searches. We’re focused on more precisely detecting pages where you can purchase a product, adding more information for each source, and many other experience improvements. If you run a shopping site and you notice that your site isn’t surfacing or would like richer information to surface, please check out this post which details the site tags we support, how we may use the information in ranking, and additional opportunities to work together to help our customers find your site to complete their task.
- Related searches based on the image to help you discover more images like the one you found.
- Pinterest collections with this image to help you locate other images pinned by people who also loved and pinned this one. We’re starting with Pinterest but plan on expanding out to other sites over time.
- More sizes of the image available from across the web.
- Pages with this image where you may be able to find more information or take actions related to the image. If the image is of food, one of these pages might contain a recipe. If the image is a location, the page may have more travel information.
In addition to the updates heading to Bing.com and apps they have also released a new Chrome extension that will bring all this updated image info into your browsing.
Here is a brief video highlighting many of these new features:
