Microsoft’s Bing search engine features a pair of visual search galleries based on the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, detailing the athletes and events due to take place.
Both are powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight web content framework, which competes with Adobe Flash for a similar rich content design market. Clicking on any of the pictures in either the athlete or event galleries will bring up a screen featuring more detailed information about the competitor or competition. The display is also sortable across a number of variables, including event, nationality and age for the athletes and gender, location, and date for events.

The visual search galleries, according to search engine optimization (SEO) experts, are one of many efforts that Microsoft has made on behalf of Bing in an attempt to differentiate the new search engine from its biggest competitor, Google.

Bing offers different types of data for queries, and many SEO practitioners say that this targets what could be Google’s weakest spot: Specificity. While Google provides a wide range of content for each query, Bing attempts to return fewer numbers of higher-quality search results.

Katherine Griwert is Brafton's Marketing Director. She's practiced content marketing, SEO and social marketing for over five years, and her enthusiasm for new media has even deeper roots. Katherine holds a degree in American Studies from Boston College, and her writing is featured in a number of web publications.