A Better Interface For Image Search?

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1. victor
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:07 am

   Mike, not all ajaxy but made of Flash.

2. Dougal
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:13 am

   Pretty funky. If your on windows I suggest you try the PicLens plug in for Firefox.

   It works on many websites Google images, facebook albums and so on…

3. Jon
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:21 am

   This is really quite neat… I wonder who owns the patent on this type of showcasing of images. Apple?

   Jon
   http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories

4. Dave
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:25 am

   Short on news eh Mikey?

5. David
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:26 am

   Piclens is the best interface yet - firefox addon for google, flickr and a few more.

6. dave sickoo
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:29 am

   i really wonder why did the World Press, WSJ, NY Times and tech magazines such as Tech Crunch hold this company very precious. (i’am asking well meant)
   Dave Sickoo
   Internet Marketer

7. Siddharth
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:35 am

   I am still hanging around the good ol Google Image Search, because I think that they have the largest index of images on the web. May be this service looks beautiful, but it is not a girl that we go on looks it is on how it works. I will give it a try.

8. Sebastian
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:36 am

   Funny thing, nothing too special, can be re-created easily. But who cares - he’s not asking for venture capital, which a Silicon Valley-person would probably do.

9. Chris
   

   April 21st, 2008 at 5:39 am

   It appears he put together a bunch of open-source scripts like prototype, scriptaculous, and reflection and made a useful application. That is what the open-source web is all about! Beautiful application. By the way, that effect he has on his site is similar, but not exactly like the patented Cover Flow by Apple.

10. Michael Arrington
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 5:41 am

    I like one-person weekend projects, and tend to write about them.

11. Jason de Nys
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 5:43 am

    Another vote for PicLens!

12. Paolo Montrasio
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 5:50 am

    It’s done with the Protoflow http://www.deensoft.com/lab/protoflow/ Javascript library.

13. nicoosuna
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 5:51 am

    Try this one: http://www.piclens.com , it’s really cool

14. Zee
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 5:56 am

    oh dear…not that impressive i’m afraid. Where’s the real news at…

15. Jez
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 6:21 am

    Just to counteract all the negative responses to this post - I like one-person weekend projects too. Keep writing about them, please.

16. weeeee
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 7:45 am

    1 person weekend project using other peoples javascript libraries. Total crap interface.

17. steve
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 8:15 am

    This is 100x slower than looking at the thumbnails on google. I like that TC is covering small projects but this one does nothing for me.

18. Matt
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 8:24 am

    Google Image Ripper is not as pretty, but more functional.

    http://dearcomputer.nl/gir/

19. Jenny
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 8:25 am

    I’m a beta tester for search me. It seems to predicate itself on the idea that a good looking site has the best content. I can’t see why I’d want to use it.

    Piclens is good as a firefox add on, but as a plugin for word press, please get me out of there.

    Although my host blocks external RSS sites unless I get them to whitelist them on their firewall, so that could have been the problem with piclens plugin

    I prefer flickr and picaso for myself and search google images if I need one.

20. Sean
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 8:35 am

    I don’t think this is a better interface, mainly because it just takes too long to scroll through the results. The effects are also dreadfully slow, I have a shiny new laptop and even on this it feels like about 3 frames per second.

    I do agree however about weekend projects, often times can turn out something interesting. I don’t think I would ever use this though, even if it was faster.

21. Miles
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 8:50 am

    The layout is probably not optimal for monetization but it’s still a cool project. Not all tools are meant to be practical. We can have some pure enjoyment on the web.

22. jeremy
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 9:32 am

    Old news. Academic research groups have been creating this sort of interface for image search, for years already. CMU has some work that springs to mind.

23. Speed Racer
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 9:44 am

    Michael,

    Steve is right about the speed. Didn’t you ever hear about the internal Google mantra that speed is the top priority? There’s a lot of evidence out there that a faster website often beats a slower website that is more richly designed. (See Marisa Mayer’s speech where she talks about Google’s performance at the 2006 Web 2.0 summit). Early on, Google noticed that traffic decreased considerably when downloads times increased by even a fraction of a second.

    Apple’s CoverFlow technology is great for desktop apps, since nobody needs to download CoverFlow (it’s already embedded in the OS. The processor is the only thing that slows you down). But, when you have to download the CoverFlow functionality over the internet, just to view a web page, a website has a major disadvantage in that regard.

    Google’s speed is what makes it king. The rest are just bells and whistles that slow a site down.

    Google has no interest in an interface that slows down the user experience and thereby reduces usability and traffic. It may be a better user interface, but it’s added weight just doesn’t make sense on the web.

24. Jeremy Bishop
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 10:06 am

    Looks good to me, and done in a weekend?

25. geoff
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 10:18 am

    “This is built with Ajax, not Flash”

    There isn’t a single AJAX call in the thing, it’s got some fancy JavaScript, but no AJAX.

    Please keep your Web 2.0 technologies straight.

26. jeremy
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 10:31 am

    @speed racer: Yes, but sometimes speed leads to less accuracy (less precision). I.e. quality suffers with too much emphasis placed on speed.

    Here is a citation to similar work, done 5 years ago… nay published 5 years ago (in 2003) which means that the work itself was done probably 6 years ago. It was done at MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs):

    Rapid serial visual presentation techniques for consumer digital video devices, Wittenburg, et al. ABSTRACT: “In this paper we propose a new model for a class of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) interfaces [16] in the context of consumer video devices. The basic spatial layout “explodes” a sequence of image frames into a 3D trail in order to provide more context for a spatial/temporal presentation. As the user plays forward or back, the trail advances or recedes while the image in the foreground focus position is replaced. The design is able to incorporate a variety of methods for analyzing or highlighting images in the trail. Our hypotheses are that users can navigate more quickly and precisely to points of interest when compared to conventional consumer-based browsing, channel flipping, or fast-forwarding techniques. We report on an experiment testing our hypotheses in which we found that subjects were more accurate but not faster in browsing to a target of interest in recorded television content with a TV remote.”

    So, TechCrunch, get with it. These interfaces are not new.

27. MikeW
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 10:46 am

    Silly

    These types of interfaces are best in space-constrained environments, not for a web browser maximized on a 24″ widescreen LCD.

    Funny when people copy a design without understanding the reason the underlying decisions were made.

28. Trevor Lee
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 11:19 am

    Micheal, you mentioned that creativspace would not be fundable, that piqued my curiosity a bit, wonder what that means. Is it due to it being based on Google’s page returns?

29. Todd Levy
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 11:55 am

    @Michael

    Here’s my one-person weekend project…

    http://searchquilt.com

    Please feel free to write about about it!

    Todd

30. Martin
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 12:37 pm

    Micheal,
    I think it would be fair if you mentioned the library that does all the heavy lifting behind this website: http://www.deensoft.com/lab/protoflow/

    A friend of mine (Obaid over at Deensoft) wrote ProtoFlow and I know he put in a fair amount of work into this, certainly far more than the 1 weekend it took make the ProtoFlow/GIS mashup, so I think he deserves to have all his hard work recognized

31. Tim G
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 12:44 pm

    It’s nice looking but nothing really ground breaking here. This is a useful image search tool: http://www.picturesandbox.com

    BTW…I ripped out some crappy carpeting this weekend and exposed some beautiful oak floors. Feel free to write about it if you like.

32. Searchthis
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    Working search engine is very risky business.

    Searchme.com is mostly likely get sue by Apple, Inc due to patent & copyright infringement. They are going to lose $32 million dollars & future IPO.

    Not very good business practice.

33. Adam
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    This is by far the best image display available, its free, its available for all major browsers and its extremely fast. It ties into, flickr, google images, facebook, myspace and more. Its the fastest way to view a large amount of images on the web. Plus the interface is sexy as hell.

    http://www.piclens.com/

34. Speed Racer
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    @jeremy: accuracy shmaccuracy. I’m sure you’re right, but people just don’t have the patience to wait for a slow interface to load. When all is said and done, people tend to gravitate towards speedy interfaces as Google has proven time and time again.

35. Anuj
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 3:39 pm

    grow up guys…UI cant get worse than this

36. Alec
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 3:41 pm

    One more vote for PicLens. This guy’s project is nice and all, but the PicLens plug-in is fantastic. Whenever I’m painting and need references, I go to Google Image Search and, once there, just open PicLens to view a seemingly infinite wall of appropriate images to search through. It makes finding those images that you are looking for but always miss because they’re on page 10 of the search results.

37. Brent
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 3:50 pm

    A bunch of my friends work at CoolIris (the people that make PicLens) so I was skeptical trying their stuff at first… you know how friends try to pawn off their shit on you. But it turns out to be a really great interface for browsing photos, I love it.

    It’s way better than SearchMe’s interface. i’m surprised they got $31 mill for that.

38. Augustine Fou
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 6:01 pm

    How about this one… made ENTIRELY in AJAX (not a single thing is Flash). Searches across multiple collections, including Flickr’s Creative Commons photos.

    http://picturesandbox.com

    and the corresponding Facebook app for using Flickr creative commons photos for e-greetings — phreetings (photo + greetings)

    http://apps.facebook.com/phreetings/

39. Greg
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    It’s quite similar to coverflow. This other guy has been doing DHTML demos for years and they are far more amazing:
    http://www.dhteumeuleu.com/ (all DHTML, no AJAX)

    Also if you’re on a PC check out http://PicMe.raizlabs.com (my company) it provides a new way to view large collections of photos. It works with your personal photos as well as the photos on online services.

40. RONLG
    

    April 21st, 2008 at 9:04 pm

    I think the most impressive part about it was that it was developed using Adobe Flex.

    Seriously, did you drink your coffee this morning?

41. Speed Racer
    

    April 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 pm

    Google would never implement something like this. Go through the Google User Interface Principles and you’ll see that #2 is “Every millisecond counts.”

    http://google.com/corporate/ux.html

    If it’s not fast, Google won’t even consider it. It’s that simple.

42. ProtoFlow
    

    April 25th, 2008 at 5:08 am

    The code originates here:

    http://www.deensoft.com/lab/protoflow/

43. See-ming Lee
    

    April 30th, 2008 at 11:51 am

    Best UI for Google image search is PicLens: http://piclens.com

    See my review of it on Flickr:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/s.....435087326/

    Or on my blog:
    http://blog.seeminglee.com/200.....-easy.html

    Cheers,
    SML

44. Coollector
    

    May 9th, 2008 at 6:34 pm

    If you like Piclens, and if you’re also a movie buff, here’s a freeware that uses Piclens 3D wall to display your DVD collection, your favorite movies & series, your favorite actors, etc…

    It also uses the latest PicLens feature to find videos on YouTube (trailers, interviews, making of, alternate scenes, spoofs, etc…)

    http://www.coollector.com