Bing hasn’t started showing dropdowns like that yet, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t.

I think we’re going to see images and videos when the search engines think we might want them, regardless of whether we really do or not.

Search results are getting richer, and providing more information inspite of a desire on the parts of the search engines to present those results in ways that aren’t cluttered, and don’t interfere with searchers abilities to find what they want.

By offering “related” results in those search results in creative ways, the search engines are transforming the way that SEO is done, forcing people optimizing for search engines to consider how a search engine might present results, and what it might offer in terms of query refinements and alternative searches. It does make things interesting.

It is a balancing act, determining how the presentation of search results might impact the ability of people to use them and find the information that they are looking for. I do think that the ability to explore related topics through dropdowns, or even the expanded abstracts that Bing now shows when you hover over a search result can be helpful. There’s a lot of talk recently about whether or not Google’s new search result interface has negatively impacted the amount of visits to many sites recently, and it’s possible that they have. We can’t take topics like that for granted.

I’m not sure that there’s much you can do about that. It’s likely that they will become even more advanced in the future.