Office Standard Microsoft Bing gets visual search;

Microsoft is incorporating to Bing a brand new visual-search feature, which it will start rolling out on September 14. But a full-fledged refresh of Bing isn;t coming till later on this fall, Microsoft officials stated.At last week;s annual business meeting,Office Standard, some Microsoft personnel tweeted that Microsoft was readying a Bing two.0 update and that it might roll out when this week. Mapping and Silverlight integration with Bing are amongst a few of the capabilities on tap, the tweeters who noticed the demos final week stated.Tweets or no tweets, “there isn;t really a Bing 2.0,” claimed Stefan Weitz, a Director in Microsoft;s Bing group.Weitz said Microsoft is currently doing monthly updates to Bing, the renamed and revamped “decision engine” it rolled out in late Might possibly. But there is a more comprehensive, full-fledged update of Bing coming this fall, he acknowledged, though he declined to call it Bing 2.0. He also wasn;t ready to share specifics about what;s coming in the larger release.Today;s update is about offering searchers a new option for displaying results, Weitz said. Bing users who go to Bing.com/visualsearch will be able to see about 50 initial “classes,” or ##################, via which they;ll be able to browse a variety of brands, places and people. Images of hundreds of celebrities, politicians, handbags, and travel destinations will be presented to searchers to held them weed through results more quickly.Here;s what the main ############## page looks like:Over time, the plan is for Microsoft to integrate these visual-search results into the Bing home page and navigation bar.And here;s what a Bing visual lookup for “NFL teams” returns:Visual lookup is better suited to some kinds of queries than others, Weitz concurred.“We;re trying to get everyone to think about search differently,” Weitz mentioned. “We;re seeking to provide an experience that makes sense for a particular modality.”Microsoft;s visual-search technology, with its Silverlight 3.0 thumbnail images, was developed internally by the Bing team, Weitz mentioned. He said the team researched a year ago the various ways that queries manifest, and developed the new technology to help make it easier for users to narrow their search results. For certain kinds of queries — such as those from searchers looking to buy something — visual search helped them locate the correct results 20 percent faster than text results alone, Microsoft found.In related news, it looks like the first milestone test build of at least a number of the components which will comprise Windows Live Wave 4 is out. I wonder whether the bigger Bing update will be timed to coincide with a public test build of Live Wave 4 ….