Wrapping up of the presentations from Day 1 of Techcrunch50. Lots of interesting ideas and products were presented, along with some bad ones. 

While not every presentation was related to SEO / SEM, there was 1 stand out presentation from Bing which you as an internet marketer should take note and 12 other TechCrunch 50 presentation that were related to SEM.

Bing launches "Bing Visual Search" and "Bing wave 2" set to launch by October.

Bing visual search is a new search product currently available to the USA. Visual search starts by displaying topics grouped into thumbnail "galleries" such as entertainment, famous people, reference, shopping and sports.Upon clicking on each gallery thumbnail you are than taken into further galleries based on your selection.

Visual search is part of the "Bing wave 2" roll-out, which Microsoft is hoping to capture the 5% of searches which makes up 50% of the time spent on search engines.

Bing wave 2 aims to gain market share by targeting question based and task based searches, which it has grouped into "Rich Content" search;

The 3 main search user types were classified as:

1. Standard : keyword to URL search
2. Question Based : eg "What are the main causes of liver cancer" 
3. Task based : Product reviews and research queries.

Bing is promoting "rich content" search as a evolutionary progress by comparison to DOS ( which was a command line OS ) to a GUI OS such as Windows.

Bing wave 2 is to target these 4 key areas;

• Travel
• Health
• Shopping
• Local search
• ( So if you work in these industries take note )

In the video the speaker demonstrates a query in Bing VisualSearch for a Digital Camera, a handbag and two insightful queries for female politician Barbara Boxer and a family movie. While only VisualSearch is available now, the speaker also demoed the other beta features of Bing 2, such as:

• Official site with sitelink actions.
• Separate Twitter results
• Social media sharing: Invite your friends to see this movie you just found on facebook, Twitter and Email.

Here are the screen-cap of the video with the new features. Apologies for thepoor quality image.

My 2 cents

After watching the presentation twice and been able to digest the information, here are my conclusions.

• Seems like Bing is pushing towards the younger and older non tech savy searchers with VisualSearch, the speaker mentioned at least 4 times how children love VisualSearch. As a power searcher I am not a fan of the new interface, but I can agree that visual search will appeal to these 2 markets, especially when combined with travel, health, shopping, and local searches.
• Bing still wants to compete with Google on standard search, but will do much better by innovating into the "rich media" arena. I have a sneaking suspicion someone at Google knew about Bing's new updates and decided to pre-launch Caffeine. SEO's are still trying to understand the real impact of Caffeine, but IMO we have yet to see the real Caffeine update.
• I am wondering how Bing is going to determine and rank these official pages, maybe they check domain registrar details?
• Displaying tweets on search results will also present problems with reputation management.
• We all know Microsoft has been developing image recognition, with the acquirement of Photosynth, image tagging and recognition will help Microsoft push VisualSearch even further. For example, advertisers could upload some glossy magazine or tabloid shots with stars in them, and tag their watch / handbag with a product name, this would than appear in visual search.

If you are interested in testing Bing VisualSearch, unfortunately it is currently available in the US only. However with I was able to get access to it by using FoxyProxy and an anon proxy server in the US, it may work for you as well.

I will be posting the other 12 TechCrunch50 presentations I mentioned on  Li'l engine search and marketing blog , please feel free to drop by and say hi.