A study conducted by Microsoft Research shows that consumers can process results with images 20% faster than text only results. So it’s clear that images play a big part in helping consumer’s with a variety of search activities.

We have taken this to heart with Bing’s new Visual Search feature announced today as a beta at TechCrunch50. Visual Search is a new way to formulate and refine your search queries through imagery, particularly for sets of results that tend to be more structured. We call these data groupings galleries. Simply go to www.bing.com/visualsearch and install Silverlight if you don’t have it already.

http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/09/14/visual-search-why-type-when-you-can-see-it.aspx

[Moved from "Microsoft launches Visual Search ("Bing 2.0")" – Tony]

http://searchengineland.com/bing-2-0-unveiled-visual-search-25703

and

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10351491-250.html

Using Silverlight seems like a silly barrier for using this. Search Engine Land quotes a statistic which says 73% of users do have it installed, though. I find that number really high.

I had installed Silverlight just for this purpose but now I am removing it again. It's useless.The same can be done with Flash/DHTML and I don't want more junk on my machine.
(Microsoft: Just stop pushing your "copied"-products to aggressively to the customer)

I was writing the post at the same time with WebSonic.nl...

(Thanks Juha, I updated the post)

I think you misunderstood some of how this visual searching is supposed to work and it's stage now.

   First, It's only in Beta so there would obviously be not as much data. Ditto for when you typed google on top of it and expecting a list of books on google. I think they only have limited categories for it.

   Second, you mentioned expecting a larger image instead of text results. I think you might be comparing this to the image search in google. I don't think that this it's intended purpose. I think MS want this for some people who don't want to search via names .. I think the best examples are pets or celebrities, say for example you want to search for a specific dog or cat or hamster you saw in a shop. You know what it looks like but not it's name. This is where the visual search comes in. Same thing with movies, say you want to search for characters in Sopranos – simple, just click on their picture :)

> First, It's only in Beta so there would obviously be not as much data.

But is their approach scalable at all, I mean, at a later stage? Products like http://www.google.com/squared for instance look like they take a scalable, automated approach *from the start* (in this case, very buggy), whereas Bing Visual Search seems to be semi-hand-picked. So even if they expand from UFC Fighters to "Australian Boxing Champions of the 1930s", their categories will still slowly evolve and may never have exactly what I'm looking to search for. If I'm wrong, then all the better... we'd have a really neat visual search tool from Microsoft soon.