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Bing image search will now help you buy things

Bing image search will now help you buy things

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Just not always the right things

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Bing is overhauling its image search page to make it show a lot more information and, hopefully, be a lot more useful. The most interesting new feature basically allows you to shop through image search. When you select an image of a product, one of the first things you'll see below it is a strip of website logos showing where you can buy it. Click on one, and it'll try to take you out to the right product page — it doesn't always work perfectly, though: a baseball bat accidentally took me to the purchase page for what was described as a "Five Lobe Viking Sword With Scabbard." Bing notes that this feature is still in beta.

The image search page is getting a number of slight design tweaks, including the addition of more information when you click in on an image. Beyond purchase locations, Bing will also show related images, additional sizes of the image, pages where the image appears, and Pinterest collections that include the image. Pinterest collections are a neat addition, but they kind of feel like a bad replacement for the suggested subjects that Google's image search now displays at the top. Displaying related images can also be a hazard, such as when you search for "tent" and a thumbnail result for "underwear tent" appears. TL;DR: the image search update has some nice ideas but still needs improvement here and there.