Later today Bing is set to release an updated version of its popular iPad app, including an improved movie experience, a “swipe through the last 6 Bing homepage images” feature, and hundreds of quality and performance improvements.

What’s most interesting about the update, though, is the introduction of “Lasso”:

With Lasso, you don’t have to navigate copy/paste commands to get from a web page to the search box, something that can take up to 9 steps on the iPad currently, according to a post on the Bing Search blog.  Lasso allows you (as you can see in the image above) to just circle a snippet of text with your finger, and in two steps initiate a search (with Bing, of course!).

The blog post promises more to come for Lasso:

What you’re seeing today is only the beginning. Lasso moves Bing beyond the search box. Although it will only be available in Bing for iPad to begin with, we’re already thinking about how to take Lasso even further – so stay tuned.

If you have Bing for iPad already, you should be seeing an update for it in the App Store, or you can get it from iTunes.