Give Microsoft credit for getting itself on the same stage as Google at TechCrunch 50 with just a fraction of Google’s users — but both companies touted what appears to be demoware and are skilled marketing machines.
Microsoft this morning introduced “visual search” — the ability to use Bing to search through pictures of products in the travel, health, shopping and other categories. Want a digital camera? Scroll through an array of 1500 pictures, lined up like the racks of guns Keanu Reeves surveyed in the movie “The Matrix.”
Google this afternoon introduced Google fast flip — scroll through pictures of pages from magazines or newspapers as if you were holding them in your hand. This also looks like visual search to me, but Google is emphasizing speed.
It’s not clear when these products are available, although Google claims publisher partners for flip find. But search startups and investors tell me that the tech giants’ focus on each other leaves more room for them to innovate — perhaps, for awhile, unnoticed.
Google alum David Lee, now an investor at Ron Conway’s SV Angel, told me he has four investments in “real-time search” — the ability to get context instantly on big events like Michael Jackson’s death as they are being discussed on places like Twitter.
Dan last week wrote about one of these investments — Factery.net, which is working on a “semantic extraction program” called FactRank.
There are other search startups at TechCrunch 50 — Trademarkia, for example, which is a business-name search engine — and I’ve talked to still others that are launching soon.
Keywords are just the beginning of search, it appears, even though the field is now dominated by tech giants. It’ll be fun to see if and when the real competition begins.
