New Bing feature helps you visualize your search

Bing recently introduced a new way of searching, helping you narrow the scope of your search by cycling through a set of pictures. Bing Visual Search [1], which is still in Beta, is organized into a series of categories, such as celebrities and sports. The visual search tool is a very interesting and exciting way to get at the information you want, but as a tool still in Beta, it still has a way to go.

Before you can use Bing Visual Search, you need to install Microsoft Silverlight [2] (which is Redmond's answer to Adobe Flash [3]). Right now there are about 40 categories for subjects like cell phones, baseball and movie stars. Let's say you want to find the number one song on the Billboard Top 100 for 1967. You can do that.

Click the Billboard's Past Songs category (the one with the Jim Morrison and the Doors cover) and the category opens. The more items in the category, the longer it takes to open, but the wait is not terribly long for this list even with 500 items in the category. What's nice about the visual search is that it takes advantage of the related topics bar along the left hand side of the screen, which is available in the standard text search as well.

This enables you to click through facets or categories to get at exactly the information you want. In this case, click 60s Number 1, then move your cursor over the results to find that Lulu, "To Sir With Love" was the number one song for 1967. Click the album name to see a text list of results with things like pictures of Lulu, a link to a YouTube video of her singing the song and so forth.

This way to move quickly through information to find exactly what you are looking for is extremely clever and could eventually have wider utility on the consumer web and in the enterprise with certain types of information, it can help you find exactly what you want from a long list of possible answers.