FaceSearch vs Bing Visual Search

Use Bing Visual Search when you want to know what is in a picture or where a copy of it has been published; it is free, fast and built into Edge and Windows. Use FaceSearch when the question is who else has this face on a public page, because Bing does not index faces and will return shirts, backgrounds and look-alike compositions rather than the same person.

At a glance

What Bing Visual Search is for

Microsoft's own feature list on the Visual Search page is about things, not people: "Shop for what you see", "Find similar images", "Identify objects around you", "Translate and copy text", "Solve for homework". You can drag an image in, take a photo, paste an image or URL, or start from the Edge right-click menu and the Windows Snipping Tool. For a stolen product photo, a landmark, a plant or a piece of furniture it is excellent, and it is one of the better free engines for finding where an exact picture has been reused.

Faces are where it stops. Bing does not build a face index and does not rank results by facial similarity, so a portrait usually returns other portraits that share a pose, a colour palette or a background. Sometimes that includes the same person; usually it does not. That is a design choice, and Microsoft's page does not mention facial recognition at all. A face search engine does the opposite job on purpose: it measures the face, ranks by face similarity and shows the page each match came from.

Where Bing Visual Search wins

• Free and unlimited, with source pages shown and no account.
• Objects, products and places. Nothing in a face engine will tell you where to buy the jacket in the photo or which building is behind the person.
• Copies of the exact picture, including resized and cropped versions, as a complement to TinEye and Google Lens.
• Built into tools you already have: Edge, the Bing app, Windows Snipping Tool and Windows Photos, plus Chrome and Firefox extensions.
• Text in images, translated or copied in one step, which helps when a screenshot includes a username or caption.

Where FaceSearch wins

• Other photos of the same face. The whole point of a reverse face search; Bing has no face index to match against.
• A source page on every match, ranked, saved to your history, with deep search for a wider pass.
• Removal. If the face is yours, one email takes it out of FaceSearch results for free; see remove my photos. Bing has nothing to remove you from because it never indexed your face.
• Stated handling of your upload: metadata stripped, used only for the search, never sold or added to a face database, as described on privacy by design.
• Apps and support on iOS and Android, with take-down help on Business.

Run both for a stolen photo

The two engines answer different questions, and for a reposted or stolen picture you want both answers. Bing Visual Search, like Google Lens and TinEye, finds the exact picture wherever it was republished, including on shops and marketplaces. FaceSearch finds other photos of the face: the gallery from a different event, the profile that uses a different crop, the ad that used a second photo from the same shoot. The face search vs reverse image search explainer covers the difference in depth, and the how to reverse image search guide has the steps for each tool.

Switching, or just adding FaceSearch

1. 01Keep using Bing Visual Search for objects, products and exact copies; there is nothing to cancel and nothing to opt out of.
2. 02For a face, run the first search on FaceSearch free without an account on the search page.
3. 03If the face is yours and you would rather not appear in our results, send the removal email described on remove my photos.
4. 04Searching someone else's face has rules on any engine; read acceptable use first.