Bing Image Search

While Google may have the largest and most up-to-date search index, other search providers like Microsoft's Bing need to up the ante by providing more usability options so that visitors can get more optimum and narrowed-down results. And that's exactly what Microsoft seems to have done with Bing's Image Search options. Everything is streamlined and you can filter and sort results with so much dexterity; it's almost like you are sorting numbers in Excel, and that too, visually!

While you will get a different set of visual results while searching for the same terms on Google's and Bing's Image Search options, you clearly get a better experience with Bing, at least for now. Even better, if you know how to search for visuals on Bing's Image Search, then you might feel right at home using the online image searches from within Microsoft Office programs such as PowerPoint and Word.

In this set of tutorials, we will first look at Bing's basic search options. Then, we will look at amazing individual options that can make your search results so much more useful.

Follow these steps to learn more:

1. Access Bing USA's Image Search site, as shown in Figure 1, below. Note that this page changes its appearance each day, and so it may not look exactly the same as what you see in Figure 1. However the search boxes and advanced options should work in the same way.
2. 
   Figure 1: Bing's Image Search page
2. Enter a term in the Search box. We typed in "cacti" without the quotes, and pressed the Enter key on our keyboard. You can see the results of this search in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2:  Image search results for cacti
3. To see the filters, you might need to click the Filter option, highlighted in red within Figure 2, above. This will show seven filters right beneath the tabs, as highlighted in red within Figure 3, below.
4. 
   Figure 3: Filters are now visible for image searches in Bing
4. Each of these seven filters are essentially menus that let you filter your results. You can also choose from more than one filter. In Figure 4 , below you can see that we have clicked the Image Size filter to reveal a menu, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 4, below.
5. 
   Figure 4: Filter your search results

Each of these filter options are explained in individual pages, linked from the list below:

1. Search Images by Size
2. Search Images by Color
3. Search Images by Type
4. Search Images by Layout
5. Search Images by People
6. Search Images by Date
7. Search Images by License