GigaOM » Collaboration

For Visual Searches, Try a Few Different Approaches

Samuel Dean — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:00:22 +0000

I noted with interest that Microsoft has announced a new feature in its Bing search engine, focused on visual searches. You can try it here (note that it requires you to have Silverlight installed). Like some of the dedicated visual search engines, it presents a way to do web searches by clicking through collected visual images, instead of entering keywords. Initially, it’s only available for certain types of search categories.

To perform searches, you start with a category such as “Digital Cameras,” where a search will present you with a large tapestry of individual photos of camera; a portion of the digital camera-related results is shown below. Clicking on any camera in the tapestry will take you to dedicated search results for that camera. This seems, in particular, to be a good search metaphor for, say, shopping for tech products online, where the look of the product might matter a lot to you. For general use, though, there are some other visual search engines that I favor.

As Webware notes, the new visual search feature in Bing “showcases the real value of having a search engine that blends structured data into the results.” As long as you perform visual searches on topics that are mainstream, for which Bing will tend to have a lot of structured data pre-indexed, you’ll tend to get rich sets of results back. The digital camera shopping example I supplied above is a good example of that. You can identify the camera you might like by its design, then jump immediately to lots of specific data about it. For less mainstream topics, though, the visual metaphor won’t be so useful, which is probably why Microsoft only supplies a limited number of topic categories as it beta tests the new feature.

There are a few other visual search engines that I think I’ll probably continue to use more regularly than I’ll use Bing’s new feature. Two of my favorite ones, which I wrote about here, are Viewzi, and RedZ. The best way to get a sense of what these do is to try a search, but Viewzi essentially lets you toggle between many types of visual presentations for any search topic, and RedZ gives you a rotatable set of web page thumbnails, as seen below for a search on digital cameras. You can then cycle, or rotate, through the results just as you would cycle through album art on an iPod with the Cover Flow feature.

If you haven’t tried it, I also recommend giving SpaceTime3D a try. It’s a little like RedZ, in that it presents you with arrays of web page thumbnails that you can cycle through to see what may interest you, but it presents bigger and nicer representations of the pages, and has a very slick interface.

I don’t rely on visual searches all the time, but for tasks such as shopping for new technology products online, researching people and news stories, and anything else where a picture can be worth a thousand words, these tools are useful.

What do you think of Bing’s Visual Search feature?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Report: NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility

Visually Explore Search Results With Middlespot And Search-Cube

Samuel Dean — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:00:05 +0000

If you, as I do, like to complement your Google searches with results from alternative search engines, you may want to look into a couple of players in the emerging visual search space: Middlespot and Search-Cube. As I’ve written before, Viewzi remains my top visual search engine because of the sheer number of angles from which it allows you to scan results. Out of these two new engines Middlespot, in particular, seems like it could be useful.

Middlespot (seen above) gives you text results for searches in one pane on the left of the site, complemented by a large gallery of visual results in a pane on the right. The graphical gallery on the right is the heart and soul of the site, and it allows you to pan and zoom results. As you hover your mouse cursor over any particular graphic in Middlespot, you get a larger view of it, which is an improvement on the tiny thumbnail views that many visual search engines provide.

Whenever you hover over any particular graphic in Middlespot, you get a Save to Workpad option that allows you to collect graphics you’re interested. I could see this being very useful for web designers and graphics folks who want to collect large samples of images and then drill down toward the best ones. You can view a demo of Middlespot here.

I was less impressed with Search-Cube, which presents graphical search results on a large 3-D cube that you can rotate using arrow keys or by holding the Shift key down and dragging with your mouse. (Below are results for a search on “netbooks.”) The 3-D cube looks sharp at first glance, but I didn’t find it to present an easy way to get at what I wanted.

Search-Cube could get better in future versions, though. For example, take a look at some of the screenshots of uBrowser, found here at the bottom of the page. It’s currently more of an experiment than a finished product, but it looks remarkably slick and also works with cubes, spheres and other 3-D interfaces for displaying search results.

What visual search engines do you use?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

4 Top Tools for Visualizing Search Results

Samuel Dean — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:37 +0000

Graphical and visual search engines are always interesting to me as alternatives to Google. I find that for certain types of searches, especially if I’m say, researching new hardware technology, or scanning headlines that happen to come from unusual sources, the extremely text-heavy way in which Google returns results can be sub-optimal.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Four Useful Engines for Multiple-Site Searches

Samuel Dean — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00:50 +0000

As search engines continue to proliferate on the web, sites that aggregate results from many engines do too. Especially for doing comparisons on things like technology products you may be interested in purchasing, or comparing news results from various sites, this can be very handy. You can also often save time because of the sheer number of results you tend to get back in one view.

Here are four useful sites that specialize in this, all from different angles.

Joongel is an interesting way to search collections of 10 sites at once–and that doesn’t mean just one collection of 10. You can do an Images search which will scour Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Webshots and other sites concurrently. You can also search social sites concurrently, including Digg, Twitter, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, and many more. It’s worth a try.

SearchBoth lets you search several different types of sites at the same time and view results together, but the view web workers are likely to get the most use out of is searching Google and Yahoo at the same time. At the site’s home page, you can enter your search term once, hit Search, and get back a dual-paned view of the results. Among the other types of dual searches you can do, you can search both Orbitz and Travelocity airfare prices by entering in one Departing and Destination citation.

Dogpile, of course, is one of the oldest of the multiple site search engines. It scours Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search, and Ask.com concurrently and lets you use tabs to specify what sections of the sites you want to search. For example, you can search all four sites for images, for video, or for news.

Recently, I covered Viewzi, which doesn’t just search for content from multiple sites but mashes up your search results in useful, graphical ways. For example, a search on “netbooks” returns results from Google, Forbes, CNet, Wikipedia, GigaOm, and many other sites–in text versions. If I want to see images from the various sites instead, I can click once to do that, or select other multiple-site views.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Two Unusual Ways to Go Graphical with Searches

Samuel Dean — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:31 +0000

Visual web search tools have been around for a while, with long-standing sites such as Kartoo providing graphical views of search results. These are sometimes useful and sometimes just gimmicks, but Viewzi and Redzee are two sites that may appeal to many web workers.

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.
.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.