oSkope: Six Service Visual Search
The first thing you notice with oSkope is a pleasing interface. That may sound petty, but when you consider how visual the results of every search are, a smooth and attractive interface makes a search engine easier to use. The next thing you notice is how oSkope prompts you to select a service from one of the six available; Youtube, Flickr, Fotolia, Yahoo! Images, Amazon, and eBay.
Let’s take a look at how oSkope works. Signing in is optional, but registration does allow you to save your searches, so let’s start from after the sign up. Once again we’re at the prompt to select services, and we’ve decided to take advantage of oSkope’s unique indexing of Amazon and Ebay to look for some products. Starting with Amazon we put in our search, say “bar,” in the search bar at top left. Because we are searching in Amazon there are some additional fields if we want to narrow our results. Narrow by country (Amazon sites have different content in different countries), or by the Amazon category list (kitchen, books, etc.). Whatever is chosen, results are generated in thumbnails, by default in the grid view. Should we want to change the view we can also set it, via buttons on the left side, to a stack, a pile (this really makes you feel as thought you are rooting through something), a list (with brief descriptions on the side), and a graph, which sorts the results by popularity, rank, or in our case, price. The grid view suits shopping so we keep that view. As we roll over an item, a box will pop out, giving price, title, and description. If we want more detail, including a long description, we click the image.
Now suppose we’ve found some things we like. At the bottom left there is a green tab titled “My Folder.” At any time you see something you want to save, you can drag the thumbnail into it and it will save it for you, even if you’ve changed your search and service. That way when we’ve changed our search from “bar” to “wine,” we can still put items we’re interested in into our folder. This works no matter what we’re looking at, whether it be Amazon or the stock footage library Fotolia.
oSkope also searches for videos and images, which can be displayed (and saved) in the same ways that products are. As with all search results inside oSkope, items can be saved in your folder and sent by email to a friend. Your friend will receive a link to your folder and they will be able to access everything that you have. When you send videos, just as when you’ve searched inside oSkope, a player opens up in oSkope letting you screen it in an oSkope player or letting you jump to the original YouTube page.
Whether for products, images, or videos, oSkope provides a smooth interface for visual searching, even offering to change the default black background to white with the settings button on its right. Unfortunately the search engine does not combine more than the six services, but what it does with the six is impressive. To find oSkope or applications like it, there’s the Listio search visual+search-engine.
Previously in this series: SearchMe: A Visual Search Engine
Next in this series: uvLayer: Visual Search For Visual Media
Application: oSkopeListio Profile: http://www.listio.com/web20/app/oSkope/
Website: http://www.oskope.com
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Tags: eBay, find, search, search engine, videos, visual, watch
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