You see that headline? "Visual Search" is in quotation marks because Monday's announcement at the TechCrunch 50 conference about Bing's new search feature is a bit of a canard.

What Microsoft is launching is very cool, mind you. It's just not, strictly speaking, a search feature. At least not a general one.

The new feature shows you pretty Silverlight-powered fly-in thumbnail images for only 50 specific search results (it will be expanded in the future), such as "Digital cameras," "New cars," "MLB players," and "Top songs." As you refine a query from one of the 50 visual searches available, thumbnails that don't match your query anymore fly off screen, and the rest reshuffle to fill in the blank spaces.

More: More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10351491-250.html