Last year I took part in a Bing Focus Group with a bunch of bloggers, which was a really interesting experience. We were invited to visit with Bing in one of the Microsoft buildings (as far as I remember they have fancy coffee machines and great views) and asked us about how we used search engines as bloggers as well as in our everyday lives, all with an eye towards how they could make Bing better. A large part of the conversation that day was how much Pinterest is a tool we as bloggers use and have come to rely on. As part of this concern Bing has added a Pin to Pinterest option right inside the Bing image search and they’ve also added a few handy search filtering options.

Great thing #1: There is no bookmarklet to install. Bing has the Pin It button right there on the image search result page. Easy as can be.

Great thing #2: For image searches Bing includes a set of filtering tabs at the top. I can look up Dalek dresses (I’m headed to a comicon next week so what to wear has been on my mind) and with one click I can sort out dresses that are red, then brown, then white. (Look at this one! Also, shout out to Seattle’s Emerald City Comicon where that photo was taken.) You can also narrow your image search by image size, vertical or horizontal layout and how people appear in the photo. Very handy.

Tip: If you are looking for something on a specific website you simply add “site:sitename.com” in your search options. So, say you were looking for Easter eggs on this here website you’d put “Easter eggs site:notmartha.org” (like so) in as your search. From there you can narrow down by color, size, etc. I find this particularly useful for when I’m shopping. Does Nordstrom have any yellow cardigans I’d like? Why, yes they do.

Great thing #3: Bing automatically links the image you’ve pinned back to the original, high quality image source. Proper attribution is a good thing and this makes it easy. When you’re in the early stages of research you can quickly Pin a bunch of images right through Bing and know that the link to the page you will want to find later on is there.

The Bing image search Pin to Pinterst option allows me to quickly gather images for inspiration and reliably keep the sources straight. Meaning I can be efficient and a little bit lazy at the same time. So darn useful.

This post was sponsored by Bing, all thoughts are my own.