As part of its continuing effort to catch up with Google in the search engine arena, Microsoft recently announced that its Bing search engine has been enhanced to allow users to perform image-based searches. According to InformationWeek, Bing’s new visual search capability is currently in the beta stage and is available in only a limited number of search categories. The target application for visual searching is consumers searching for products. The visual search capability is enabled by Microsoft’s Silverlight Web display technology.

Google currently demands an 83% share of the worldwide search market, so Microsoft has an uphill battle to wage.