Technofriends

Microsoft Bing has released a new visual based search feature which displays the search results for a search query in a grid styled image gallery instead of the usual text links shown in the usual search-query-response view.

While the report of this new feature broke out on Twitter last week, the feature was officially unveiled at the TechCrunch50 event by Microsoft’s Senior Vice President, Yusuf Mehdi. Bing Visual Search requires Silverlight, which makes the animations and visual rendering possible.

There are more than 100 visual galleries ranging from movies, books, and cars to products, animals, and sports teams. The sorting categories change each time. So for movies, you can filter by release date, title, or rating. Cars can be sorted visually by make, price or mileage.

Checkout the below embedded video of the demo.

In my opinion, this is definitely great use of the structured data Microsoft Bing has. Bing certainly seems to be picking the ball which Google hasn’t yet touched, representing the structured data in a graphic.

While, there are lot of queries and results which cannot be structured and represented through images, and it will for sure take some time to represent them. But believe me, for now, this feature, is certainly very impressive.

TechCrunch

[Update] If you are outside US and wish to access the visual search feature, try modifying your country to US for the time being. Seems like the rollout of the feature is still limited to United States.

You can also follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/vaibhav1981

Do stay tuned to Technofriends for more, one of the best ways of doing so is by subscribing to our feeds. You can subscribe to Technofriends feed by clicking here.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Live Search Transforms into Bing
2. [How-To] Add Bing Search Box On Your Website
3. Microsoft Bing Developer Kit for iPhone and Mac Launched
4. MSN Video to be Re-Branded as Bing Videos
5. Microsoft to shut down Bing Cashback program on July 31st