At TechCrunch50, Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi announced a new visual search feature on Bing which returns results as an interactive gallery of images. VisualSearch is currently in beta and available to United States users only. You can still try it out by setting your preference to United States. We have tried out the new VisualSearch, and we strongly recommend you to try the VisualSearch for Travel Destinations, World Leaders, Celebrities, & Cars.

How many times have you seen a movie trailer and forgotten the name of it the next day? You go online to search for it but you can’t seem to find the movie with “what’s-his-name” in it anywhere but you can picture the actor in your head. 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.

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. What you’ll see is an amazing new visual search experience. Visual Search allows you to quickly scroll through the galleries or do a one-click refinement using the quick tabs on the left, which are specifically relevant to the type of results you are browsing through.

Now to find that movie you were looking for, click on “Movies” and scroll through the imagery to find “what’s-his-name.” Now that you found it, hover your mouse over the movie to view details including title, rating, reviews, and how much it grossed at the box office, all right under the search box. Think about how much time you saved using Visual Search.

Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch co-editor), Steven Levy (Wired Magazine), and Nick Wingfield (The Wall Street Journal) discusses the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal with Charlie Rose.

Bing recently added Twitter feeds as part of its search results. Today, Federated Media & Bing announced the launch of BingTweets, a website that combines Twitter search results and Bing search results onto one page. Read our review.

As Bing continues to develop and grow, more and more webmasters would want to know how they can improve their site rankings on Bing. Here are 10 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips to increase your website’s ranking on Bing….

Here is a document from the Catalyst Group. It is a report summarizing the study performed on 12 individuals who were asked to use both Bing & Google.

Stefan Weitz, Direct of Microsoft Search Group, talks in details about Bing.

Since Bing’s debut on June 1st, it received a lot of publicity and fanfare. According to comScore, Bing’s daily searcher penetration had reached to 16.7% between June 8, 2009 – June 12, 2009.