Travel Weekly Blog

Bing UK created a good visual search of prime ministers for the state opening of Parliament today (you'll need to install Silverlight) - and it turns out there's one for travel destinations too.

(Visual Search isn't an open-ended tool at this stage, there are just a handful of galleries that Bing has developed itself.)

It's a story best told with screengrabs:

So the first big problem is picture selection. While there are obvious ways to visually differentiate UK prime ministers (their faces) it isn't always that simple with travel. The enlarged section is the thumbnail for Hawai'i's Big Island. A clear visual clue? Not to me.

We drill down using category filters on the left, again enlarged, and get a flat gallery with some text cues. (You can also move up or down in the taxonomy by hovering over an image, which opens up a little sub-menu.)

Subsequent screens resemble this one, but with fewer 'results' as you refine your 'search'.

I use scare quotes because, as I said, this is a static gallery and not a true search tool - but it leads to true search results, because the endpoint of this process is a page of standard Bing results for the image you clicked on.

Hit the thumbnail for Bath, UK, and you'll get...

...organic search results for Bath, UK.

Clearly this is experimental, and it's a nice interface. I'm sure there are some more sophisticated ways it could work in the travel market - 'destinations' is after all as broad as it gets...

Twitterthanks: @alisongow, who retweeted the UK PMs gallery from MSN UK executive producer @peterbale.