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.

The engineers at Microsoft are working on a new feature where users have the ability to share search results. They are calling this search sharing feature “Bing & Ping”. From the photos provided, it appears that the results can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, and email.

Nicholas Kerr from Bing’s search blog wrote:

We at the Bing team are firm believers in the idea that the only thing better than searching with Bing is sharing what you’ve found with your friends. That’s why we’ve been working on a potential new feature for Bing that does just that in a couple of clicks, which we call Bing & Ping.

Let’s break this down with an example: say you use Bing’s Instant Answers feature to check the score of the game, and you notice that your buddy’s favorite team has just been beaten pretty handily. Say you want to “delicately” remind him of their less-than-stellar moves with the ball. Bing & Ping lets you share this NFL instant answer through various places, like Facebook, Twitter, or even email in as few as two clicks. Reminding someone that their team has no defense has never been easier (in spite of the screenshot below, we of course aren’t talking about our beloved Seahawks).

Today, Bing introduces Twitter postings as part of its search results. When you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. It is a very strategic & intelligent move to add twitter postings as part of Bing’s search results…