Google, Bing try to make your searches easier to look at

(NECN: Ted McEnroe) – A pair of search giants have rolled out platforms they hope will make their results a little easier for users to look through. Google and Microsoft both released ‘visual search engines’ for parts of the web this week – and while neither is all that special on its own, they do point to a possible future for search. Google Labs’ Fast Flip is a new search interface for Google News. It lets users scan through webpages for more than 30 news and entertainment sites, by latest news, by topic or by publication. Fast Flip does let you flip quickly through the pages, but if you see something you like and click on it, you’re whisked away to the actual site for the story. That’s good for the site, bad for the searcher, who then has to either page back or reload Fast Flip to see more results. And the interface lacks some of the options that a standard Google news search includes – a search for “Patriots” this morning brought up just two of 20 results that had to do with Monday night’s win over Buffalo, for example, along with a lot of dated results. But with no way to sort by date (maybe do that automatically, Googlekids?), you couldn’t do much better. On the overall search side, Microsoft’s Bing search engine will now let you see results by image, if you try out their Visual Search beta. Right now the company has rolled it out only for a limited number of topics, but those topics could be very lucrative, when you talk about entertainment news and shopping, for example. Even in shopping, the interface is a little limiting. For example, the search for HDTVs brought up tons of results, but didn’t shed much light on them. But for travel destinations, the card catalog works better – you can find the pictures you like and click through to see where the image is from. (Side note: If you’re a little confused, thinking, “Hey, can’t I already search images?” You can search for images now through things like Google image search. Visual search works like a standard web search – it just puts your results in image form.) If you’re looking for new news or web search tool, don’t rush to either of these. But keep an eye on them. They could be the beginning of a trend, especially in a touchscreen world, where manually flipping through the images could be a much more user-friendly way to browse results.