• Search Engine Land, Wednesday, May 23, 2012 12:55 PM

What about Bing’s highly touted visual search feature? Microsoft’s search engine scrapped that a while ago -- and without anyone realizing it. “The fact that almost no one noticed might be one reason why Bing has dropped its Visual Search feature … something that apparently happened months ago,” Search Engine Land write. “To be clear, this isn’t traditional image search that we’re talking about; that’s still available at bing.com/images.”

Rather, Bing’s “Visual Search” tool-cum-interface debuted in 2009, and used Silverlight technology to let searchers view a large set of images and data. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that company began removing Visual Search galleries last fall -- “a long time for something to be shut down with virtually no one noticing,” SEL adds.

“Last fall, we began the process of removing Visual Search galleries on Bing. Like all of our betas, Visual Search was part of an on-going effort to better understand how we can offer the best search experience possible,” a Microsoft spokesperson told LiveSide.net.

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