Fastflip and Bing

A few weeks ago I posted about Google and Microsoft making announcements about new developments at roughly the same time, and it's happened again.

Google have announced FastFlip - a new way of searching for and reading news which is supposed to mirror the way you flick through a newspaper - there's also a mobile version which works on Android and iPhone. You can choose which categories of news you're interested in, or perform a search and you're presented with a gallery of pages which you can flip though. I've had a quick try and it's very fast and looks pretty good.

Microsoft have announced that their search engine, Bing, now includes a visual search where you can browse images instead of text and select or deselect them to refine your search. It's not live yet, but apparently should be here sometime soon. Those who've tried it are impressed, but unfortunately it's limited to the number of search libraries which Microsoft has created - there's no Bing engine creating visual libraries on the fly. So, the number of things you'll be able to use this for is limited by how popular certain search terms are.