As video and image content on the web becomes more prevalent and compelling, search engines are finding new and innovative ways for users to search and browse through these rich contents and provide a more visual search experience. Google Image search is great but the interface is really built on top of the traditional text web search and hasn’t evolved along with the type of rich content available now and user’s expectation in terms of searching for visually rich contents.
There has been various visual search engines that caters for these needs, they are really a special type of aggregation search engine that focus on video and images contents using a number of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These search engines are visually rich with very innovative user interface that are completely different from your traditional web search experience and you primarily browse and decide on where you want to drill into from the results set based on images or screen shots of the websites.
One of these visual search engines is SearchMe which display screen shots of the page and images in the results in an iTunes Cover Flow like layout that is familiar to iTunes users. This allows you to quickly decide which website to focus on based on the look of it by flicking through them.
CoolIris which is one my favourite alternative search engines is another visual search engine that is taking the idea of cover flow to the next level to provides a completely new and unique search experience.
As an example, when I search for “iPhone leather case” the look of the case is probably of the utmost importance to me as a searcher. additional, the ability to visually browse through all type of leather cases quickly and efficiently is also of benefit to me as a searcher. This is exactly what Cooliris allow you to do!
Cooliris not so much as provides a cover flow layout but more of a cover WALL layout that gives you the feeling of walking pass a continuous walls of images that stretches indefinitely after you do a search. You can use the same unique search interface to search through Flickr, and YouTube and find your results in a wall of images. The shopping search option is particular useful as it not only lists images of the product you are searching for but also include the price and a link to where you buy it. I must say it works very very well. This visually rich experience is achieved through a browser plugin for both IE and Firefox and the the result is indeed a very un-browser like experience.
The layout is not only beautiful but effective. I personally think it is one of the most effective design in terms of searching for and browsing through visually rich contents.
More importantly, what is it good for ? Searching for images and video from multiple sites is an obvious area where you can have a lot of fun. If you are searching for ideas or products and are primarily interest in how it looks, Cooliris can definitely make you life a lot easier and make the search experience more interesting.
As an added bonus, CoolIris also offer an iPhone app version of its search engine which amazingly delivers a similar visual experience using the comparatively much smaller iPhone screen!
Definitely worth checking out!
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I like the visual SearchMe. I love the way it shows results, it’s a totally different way of looking at your results pages. Another new search engine that catches my fancy is Find.com. It’s fresh, simple, with bigger fonts and search box. What’s more, it gives relevant results too.
Thanks for the tip of Find.com and feedback !
Wow didn’t even know cooliris and searchme.. these sites look awesom!!!
Whoa, searchme.com is impressive. Normally when “power browsing,” I just use google and open a ton of tabs that load in the background in Opera and then plow through them. Searchme.com may not be as thorough as that method, but I’m sure it’s faster depending on conditions.
And the images it brought up for some recent thorough searches I’ve done are far more than google brought up. Cool stuff. Also cool is with a couple clicks I just added it to the search choices in the Opera search bar.
Thanks for the tip Wes!
Certainly doesn’t surprise me that Searchme.com’s image search are better than Google’s. Will definitely be testing it out next time.