Photobucket Has Visual Search
Photobucket, the popular image hosting and creation web service which contains over 8 billion photos, now has implemented a new feature: Visual Search. Photobucket Visual Search is based on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, Windows Live Services (Windows Live Messenger) and Photobucket’s Open API platform, delivering a more intuitive graphical user interface for millions of users.
White spaces and file names were removed, therefore the user will see just the images corresponding to the search term and even suggestions for related searches.
Will Tschumy, a member of Microsoft’s User Experience Evangelist Group explains the advantages of Photobucket Visual Search: “It removes a lot of the text and reloading time that users have had to wade through. Presenting results as images and then using a given image as the next query to find another set of images is really just a different way of interacting with the content.”
The navigation options are also simplified through the thumbnail and full-image views. On the other hand, by the integration of Windows Live Messenger into Photobucket user interface, the image sharing is easier for Live Messenger users.
Regarding the possibility of image sharing through Live Messenger, Kevin Gallo, General Manager of Silverlight, stated:”We are tremendously pleased to help Photobucket produce such a compelling new offering like Photobucket Visual Search. Not only have they made searching for images fun with Silverlight, they’ve leveraged Windows Live’s 320+ million active users to make it easy to share found images.”
Photobucket Visual Search is available for Windows and Mac OS X users having installed the Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in.
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