In this post, you’ll find four good tools that provide useful, offbeat approaches to visual searches.

Last year, I covered Viewzi and Redzee, both of which provide unusual and often useful visual search returns. Viewzi lets you view graphical search results from many different angles. For example, if you search for “netbooks,” you’ll get back screenshots from blogs, news outlets and unexpected sites, and you can toggle to switch your views of the results. Redzee delivers search results in a similar fashion to the Cover Flow view found on iTunes. You get thumbnails of sites with content related to your search, and then you can hover and move your cursor to cycle through them. It’s a good way to sift on a rapid-fire basis through images from many sites.

Since covering these two visual search engines, I’ve become particularly reliant on Viewzi. I find that if I want to write about a topic where it’s useful to see physical examples, such as a new netbook or smartphone, the site’s “Photo Tag Cloud” custom view is very efficient. Here’s a portion of a larger Photo Tag Cloud from Viewzi, where I can use a Zoom tool to get closer looks if I want to, and I can click on the plus sign symbol to keep switching to new images in the photo cloud:

AltSearchEngines has a good video tour up of SearchMe.  This site has been out for about a year, but if you haven’t tried it, do so. The site presents search results as images, and the key to working efficiently with them is to use the blue slider bar at site bottom to flip through the images. With SearchMe, small versions of alternative results queue up next to larger ones, as seen on the right of the search for “iPhone” below:

Finally, one of the best tools in the category of video search that I’ve found is a Firefox extension called VideoSurf.  I covered it on the OStatic blog here.  This extension automatically provides a chronological timeline of shots from any video clip on sites such as YouTube. For example, if you’re watching a software demo video, you can see shots along a timeline that will allow you to jump to targeted parts of the video. Or if you’re writing an online piece about the U.S. Airways flight that landed in the Hudson river, you can use a timeline like the one seen below to gauge where to view relevant images. This is a really handy tool, and it works with Google Video and other sites as well.

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The idea behind these sites is to shake up the model for viewing search results, potentially allowing you to discover information you wouldn’t find with, say, a standard Google search.

Viewzi lets you view graphical search results from many different angles, with one view seen above. For example, I did a search on “netbooks” at Viewzi and got back screenshots of many blogs and news sites with current coverage on the topc. Atop Viewzi’s search results pages, there is a toolbar-like list of views I can switch to. I can investigate nebooks in a simple text view, which allows me to see a lot of results at once, I can look at various graphical grids of results, and I can choose a photo view that will show me pictures of many netbook models.

In my experience, Viewzi is especially good for evaluating things where pictures make a difference. The utility of the various available views primarily comes in letting you preview the actual sites where the content you want resides, and look at a lot of pictures at once. It’s worth trying to get a feel for it.

Redzee is another visual search engine that I like for its slick interface and very unGoogle-like approach to delivering results. I discussed it once before here, and it has come out of beta testing since then.

Redzee delivers search results in a similar fashion to the Cover Flow view found on iTunes. You get thumbnails of sites with content related to your search, and then you can hover and move your cursor to cycle through them. Here again, the site is especially good for doing things like evaluating technology projects and other physical things where pictures will make a difference to you.

If you’re used to using Google alone for web searches, the very different search metaphors found at these sites are  worth trying. Viewzi, in particular, is getting a lot of notice for its graphical flexibility.
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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks