“Seeing is believing”, an adage that can be universally applied to the retail industry, acquires greater significance in an omnichannel era where we are seeing greater overlap between in-store retail and web/mobilebased e-commerce. For retailers keen on connecting with smartphone-wielding, next-generation buyers, visual search engines are quietly emerging as the “next big thing”. This might seem a bit ahead of its time for those of us that take the ubiquity of keyword-based text search for granted; hasn’t text always been the most popular search engine paradigm for as long as we remember.

According to Baidu, the world’s no.2 search engine, in future, more than 50% of all searches online will be either based on voice or images.