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Microsoft Introduces Visual Search for Bing

05:41 - Tuesday 15 September 2009 by Jane McEntegart - source: Tom's Hardware US

It’s been a big week for Microsoft. The company today launched the Zune HD, and on Monday afternoon, it rolled out something called visual search for search engine, Bing.

Announced at TechCrunch50 by senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi, Bing Visual Search returns results as an image gallery as opposed to just a list of links. Say you want to search for cell phones. You'll be shown a bunch of images which can then be filtered by specs, color etc. Hovering the mouse over an image will automatically enter the name of the device into the search bar, making it extra easy to refine your search. A search for NFL players will return the obvious images of players, which you can then reorganize by salary, position, or team. Choosing to do so will make the images shift around and reposition themselves on the page, right in front of you.

“The whole concept is that the world of search will change," Mehdi said, according to TechCrunch. "There will be a more graphic way people will search, and it will pivot how people search," he added.

However, there are a couple of drawbacks to this seemingly awesome tool. At the moment, there are only 49 galleries, although this number is expected to grow at a rapid rate. Not really a huge deal, but worth mentioning. The second drawback is a little more of a nuisance: while Bing's visual search feature works with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome, it does require you to download Silverlight, and that's something a lot of people will be reluctant to do.

Check out the full list of galleries below and don't forget to let us know what you think!

If you live in the U.S. you can try Bing Visual Search by clicking here.