Bing announced today that it has integrated Pinterest data into its image search capability. Noting that computer sorting is a powerful tool, but that individuals can also effectively curate, Bing has added a new image collections feature.
Pinterest is a popular tool that allows its users to aggregate images of any genre and share those “Pinboards” with others. Pinterest is important enough that during the last presidential election, both the First Lady and Mrs. Romney signed up.
Bing, which already allows you to “Pin” directly to your Pinterest board from image search, places the image collections to the right of its normal results. This is what it looks like in practice:
And, when you click through, this is what you get:
Naturally the most important part of the above is the inclusion of the “View on Pinterest” button, completing the circle. There isn’t a copyright issue at hand, if your were curious, as Bing is merely crawling Pinterest the way that it indexes the rest of the Internet.
It’s a neat addition to Bing, and one that could make it more interesting to dedicated Pinterest users. However, it does feel noisy – there could be a more elegant way to bring the collections into the interface.
I would not be surprised to see more integration between Bing and Pinterest in time: Bing has money and Pinterest is working to monetize.
You can run a search here with the integration if you want to see it in practice.
Top Image Credit: mkhmarketing