MSFT Microsoft Corporation

By Nathan Olivarez-Giles 

Microsoft Corp. updated its Bing search app for iOS on Monday with a new feature that lets you search for images by taking a photo with your iPhone or uploading an image from your camera roll. Yet again, the company has built a useful, fun piece of software for iPhones -- and not its own Windows phone operating system.

It's a simple feature that's easy and surprisingly fast. You just open the Bing app, tap the magnifying glass icon on the app's home screen, then tap the camera icon. Snap a photo and Bing will return search results of similar images.

The results are solid but not perfect. In our quick test run, it appropriately recognized Citi Field and a Star Wars storm trooper, returning other similar images. When we loaded a picture of a dog, it got the species and color right, but couldn't peg the breed. One failure: A shot of a pair of shoes returned a guitar case, the back seat of a car and a Ford logo.

A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to say whether or not Bing's reverse image search would ever make its way to Windows phones or Android devices.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google doesn't offer reverse image search in its iOS search app, and it discontinued the Google Goggles image-recognition app in 2014. It does, however, offer the feature on the Web.

The utility of taking a picture and then searching for look-alike or related images is an open question. You could use this feature when you want to see something from a different angle, or from a different time, place or other context.

Amazon.com Inc.'s use of reverse image search might be the one that makes the most sense: In Amazon's iPhone and Android shopping apps (and a dedicated app called Flow), you can point your camera at objects -- paper towels, phones, books, etc.

The update to Bing for iOS follows Microsoft's release of Word Flow, an innovative one-handed keyboard for iPhones. While iOS (and Android) continue to thrive, Microsoft's own share of the mobile operating system market had fallen to 1.1% by the end of last year, according to the Gartner research firm.

Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 02, 2016 18:17 ET (22:17 GMT)

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