Viewzi: Visual Searching With Specialized Views

As search engines continue to evolve, new ways of treating the information will come forward. One of the recent evolutions is the visual web, taking traditional text based search results and turning them into visual maps of information. As we can see with the search engine Viewzi, there is more than one way to present information.

Viewzi is a visual search engine, meaning that when you search in Viewzi, you are presented with screenshots instead of text results. The advantage of this is that you are able to gather an impression of the information before committing to a click. This alone is a value, but Viewzi takes it a step further, giving you different ways of viewing of visual information.

Let’s take it from a search. Say we do a search for “banana creme.” Results come back to us as quickly as they do with the big name search engines, but unlike the big name search engines, the visual elements we see in the scrollable bar are nothing like the results you think. Each one of these “views” has a unique way of handling the results, ranging from text views to image clouds (there were 17 different views at the time of this review), helping you to narrow your search. Each of these views are more than simple snapshots of the a website, they are a way to categorize the information.

As you roll the mouse over each of the views, you’ll see a text bubble that tells you what kind of view it is. For us, the first view on the left is ”Recipe View,” and when we click on it a closeup of another scrollable selection of sites appears. This selection is pulled from recipe sites. If we were looking for a recipe, this would make the Recipe View very appealing. If we were to move from left to right with the views, we would see other views that might fit our needs. News views, text views, web screenshot views, or an Amazon book view. Each of these views specialize in that content, so if you were looking for news, the news view gets you straight there, and if you are looking for books, Amazon does the same.

Predictably, Viewzi makes finding visual results very easy. Photo views, in cloud and standard forms take you right there, and if you’re on the hunt for videos, the video view will quickly have you wondering what Elvis, Reeses, and banana creme have in common. What makes Viewzi an excellent resource for visual media is how quickly you can evaluate the results. Going through photo sites may take a lot of clicks, but with Viewzi, you can preview the results without having to leave the search page.

Viewzi is not without its detractions, though. The mp3 view listed eight songs with broken links before there was a playable preview, and failed to return popular results until the second page. The recipe pages were visually attractive, but none of the recipes had the ingredient of banana in our search for “banana creme.” In fairness, these could be overlooked in a developing application in its beta stage, yet such unsatisfactory results make us wonder what else we missed on our search. Viewzi also lets you sign in, though at the time of this review, there were no additional functions available. Presumably this is for some future customization, but as we said, the construction hats are still on at Viewzi.

Ultimately, Viewzi is an innovative approach to narrowing and visualizing searching, and well worth exploring. The aggregating tools that Viewzi uses, such as the “4 Sources” view that incorporates Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask are powerful tools once honed, and we hope for Viewzi and the web, the results are refined soon. Viewzi is in Listio under the tags visual+search-engine.

Previously in this series: uvLayer: Visual Search For Visual Media
Next in this series: Comparing Visual Search: SearchMe, oSkope, uvLayer, and Viewzi

Application: Viewzi
Listio Profile: http://www.listio.com/web20/app/Viewzi/
Website: http://www.viewzi.com

With traditional text-based search engines, no matter what or how you search, your results are basically the same. Searching for Bono looks the same as searching for chicken recipes or sports cars. Viewzi is a whole new way to experience search. Instead of one big list, you get nice visual Views ta... Learn more

New to Listio? Our tag cloud search offers an easy way to narrow your hunt for the perfect web application or service. No more second guessing of search terms. Just click on one tag, then as many more as you'd like to narrow your search results. It's easy and ensures you get to the listing you want. Finding web 2.0 was never so easy.

Tags: customize, search, search engines, view, visual, web 2.0, web 3.0
Posted in: Visual Search | Respond
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