Visual Search enable users to search by browsing through images rather than scrolling pages of text-based results.  The search results will display sortable row of galleries of images pertaining to the subject being searched,

Initially, the service will be limited to 4 main areas; travel, health, leisure and shopping and will be rolled out in the next 4 weeks.

A search on Bing will display traditional results. But on the left side of the search result will appear an option to visualize the search. Clicking on the option will deliver visual search results.

“The whole concept is that the world of search is going to change,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice president of online services.”There will be a more graphic way people will search, and it will pivot how people search.”

As TechCrunch described it:

“”If you type in “dog breeds,” it organizes them for you in a grid of images that you can scroll through using a slider on the right. When you hover over a particular image, it enters the name of that dog breed in the search box. And you can re-order the image results by size, breed, exercise needs, and Bing popularity.”

“””There are more than 100 visual galleries ranging from movies, books, and cars to products, animals, and sports teams. The sorting categories change each time. So for movies, you can filter by release date, title, or rating. Cars can be sorted visually by make, price or mileage.”””

Microsoft says that consumers can process image results 20 percent faster compared to text-based search results.

What will this mean for PPC down the line, hard to tell, but if history tells us anything, if Visual Search is a hit, Google will not be far behind with its own Visual Search product and with the acquisition of Yahoo on the horizon,  it’s a feature that can’t be ignored.

VisualSearch.com is registered to Idea Lab.

For instance, if you type in “dog breeds,” it organizes them for you in a grid of images that you can scroll through using a slider on the right. When you hover over a particular image, it enters the name of that dog breed in the search box. And you can re-order the image results by size, breed, exercise needs, and Bing popularity.