Today, Seattle giant Microsoft announced on their newsgroups and website the latest feature to its Bing search engine: Visual Search.

The new Visual Search feature is primarily used for when you’re shopping for products. The search function allows you to search for products through a series of images to find the exact product you’re looking for.

For instance, looking for a digital camera can refine results alongside the Visual Search tools to narrow them down to brand, color, price and other specifications.

Other functions of Visual Search are prominent, bringing the Minority Report type of computing closer to reality. Image databases by category are nothing new to the online world. USENET newsgroups were the very first hub of category browsing of images by topic supplied by the newsgroup community.

The Microsoft newsgroups reported that the current version of Visual Search is in beta and is not found on the main Bing page. You can find it here.