Bing’s new image search: the Pinteresting of the internet continues

Everybody wants to be Pinterest.

Bing has been updating its search engine results pages significantly this year, including an aesthetic and architectural revamp in May. Today Microsoft announced that image search, which is almost 10 percent of Bing traffic, is getting a facelift too.

The new look is gorgeous … and very reminiscent of Pinterest. I don’t know how much more of this I can handle.

With 12 saving and sharing sites that look like Pinterest, 34 Pinterest-like WordPress themes, nine Tumbler-meet-Pinterest skins, a Pinterest for porn, 50 million Pinterest clones, and more, pretty soon the entire bloody internet is going to look like Pinterest.

That is because, of course, when you look like Pinterest you will grow from nothing to everything in days and generate obscene amounts of interest and attract ridiculous amounts of investment capital.

Right?

Presumably the investment capital part is not terribly interesting for Bing. But I bet the obscene interest and massive viral growth are. And as Rafe Needleman of CNet says, Pinterest-like design is almost a virus itself.

As previously mentioned, however, the new Bing image search is gorgeous:

I mean, you could just surf the world in pictures for a while looking at pages like that, right? And that’s exactly what Microsoft intends, opining that “it’s easier than ever to sit back and enjoy yourself. You never know that you might find.”

But the new Bing image search isn’t just a pretty face. She’s smart, too, suggesting related searches (a few more than Google does) based on what people have searched for previously. Plus, Bing now provides trending image searches right on the home page — interestingly blurring search, news, and media — providing insights into the internet zeitgeist of the moment.

As of this very moment, people seem to be interested in pictures of Eva Longoria, Molly Sims, and Nick Stahl (I can’t imagine why) as well as coffee art, Mount McKinley, and Zinnias (apparently a flower of some sort):

The new Bing also enables great filtering, which is wonderful because I have always wanted pictures of purple flowers that are yellow, and a magnifying glass effect that gives users a bigger version of the image they are currently mousing over. Both are roughly similar to the Google equivalents, but a little easier to use:

It’s a great update and I enjoyed using it.

I’m just not sure I’m OK with the rampant Pinterestification that is happening to our interwebs. We’re gaining elegance and beauty, even simplicity.

What are we losing?