Bing homepage for Winter Solstice
Bing’s daily change of background image lacks the iconic simplicity of Google doodles, but apart from being more frequently updated, it’s an effective way of differentiating itself from Google’s minimalism, associating Bing with Beauty and making users come back to check the picture of the day.
Today is Winter Solstice for us in the northern hemisphere, one of the coldest I can remember. Bing shows a beautiful picture of “snow covered trees and benches in Central Park, New York City” and hovering the mouse cursor on the image a few links to related searches appear.
The link shown in the image below takes to the Wikipedia entry for “Winter Solstice”, but the page is repackaged and published as a Bing Reference page: It’s not on Wikipedia’s site, but on Bing.
If Google Living Stories can be seen as a way of accessing newspaper websites without leaving Google, Bing Reference applies the same concept at Wikipedia pages.
Bing Image Search
Our favorite decision engine helps us in deciding what image to search for on this cold and snowy day, with a cool photo wall of Winter related images/searches: Snowman, Ice hotel, Ice skating and Icicle. Aren’t you tempted to click on the pictures? It makes you almost forget you were searching for snowflake images!
Here are two more features that set Bing Image Search apart: Image properties preview and infinite scrolling.
Hovering on a specific image result brings a bigger view of the image and information about image size and weight. You can scroll the mouse wheel or use the sidebar to see new results, without the need of loading new pages (you could have to wait for the small preview thumbnails to be loaded).
Google is testing the same infinite scroll nifty feature on its own image search.
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