Viewzi-Search Visually!

Posted by Vivek ||

August 11, 2008 ||

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The title of this post has to be the one above in spite of the fact that every other search engine is also used visually. However, here the word visual has a different connotation. It’s more to do with search being visual as an adjective compared to search visually as a verb.

We all know that almost everyday a new web 2.0 company/site sprouts on the Internet farm, and the service that I am going to bring to your kind attention is one of them namely Viewzi. We all or should I say at least I am addicted to using Google as my search engine, especially when I know the power of using it with operators and query modifiers and don’t pay much attention to new search technology. Not that I don’t write about them or stay updated with them, (Abbas wrote about Cuil.com and I did a post on on TinEye not a long time back) but the very fact that I hardly use many of them on a regular basis proves my slavery to Google.

Viewzi claims to be

new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place. Oh, and it’s bolder, richer, and more fun.

Let’s quickly look at various features that this very promising search service has to offer. The home page is much of delight to the eyes and is very basic with just one single search box and small image to the video site offered by the same service. Once you search for something it gives you 17 small flash based screenshots and moving film strip like flash gallery to search for that term under various categories like album, shopping, weather and so on . This is quite good features except for the fact that it ain’t smart. It’s not smart because it doesn’t decide categories based on the search query. Let’s say I search for viagra, it still gave me the category for recipe and weather which is quite irrelevant. However, there were no results under those categories and rightly so. But these categories could have been excluded. Following is how the resultant search page looks like:

Good thing is that the most relevant category is the first in the filmstrip. Try searching for some celebrity and you’ll get celebrity photo view as the first category and as the service boasts about the effects are quite visual in a good way! I tried signing up for the service a few days back and haven’t heard from them for an invite. I hope you’ll enjoy playing with it.