Bing Adds Visual Search to Aid Searchers

True to Twitter-based rumors last week, Microsoft has announced an interesting upgrade to Bing. The new beta feature called Visual Search was announced by Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice president, at the Tech Crunch 50 conference. It injects more picture-based searching into the greater Bing engine by adding a “Visualize” option on the left side of the results page , which enables the searcher to produce rows of pictures of a given search term. Point on the picture and more information about the item pops up; click it and you’ll get a traditional search results page on the item in question.  The visual search can be further refined using variables such as price. You can check out the Beta Visual Search page for yourself to give it a test run. Unfortunately, Visual Search is limited to 50 pre-selected categories and can’t be applied to just any search term. Some of the categories include “New Cars”, “Popular TV Shows”, “HDTVs”, and the ever-intriguing “100 Heroes and Villains”. Microsoft intends to make the feature a regular part of Bing by the end of the month. The specific categories available will be influenced by the popularity of the feature. [via PC World]