One of the problems with visual search sites is that most of them are only suited for a few specific kinds of queries. Try searching for a song on SearchMe, and you’re more likely to get a Wikipedia page than an MP3. Viewzi, a startup out of Texas, is looking to offer a more adaptive visual search that can radically change in both appearance and function depending on the search term. To check out the site, click here (for now this is the only way into the site, you’re free to adjust the search term and view mode once you’re in).
Viewzi draws its flexibility from its “views”, each of which is essentially a customized search aggregator. After entering a search term, Viewzi tries to figure out what you’re looking for, and presents the results in an appropriate view. At launch there are 16 views that include the “3D Photo Cloud”, “Album View”, and the curious “Weather View”. Each view draws results from different sources, ranging from Amazon to Weather.com.
Enter a search for “More Than A Feeling”, and you get the MP3 Search View, which lists links to the song, each of which can be previewed using an embedded Flash player. Try a search for “iPhone”, and you’ll get the Gadget View, which presents a mashup of iPhone queries on Amazon, Digg, Flickr, and Wikipedia. You’re also free to manually pick which view you’d like to use, though results can be less relevant.
For the time being, users will only be allowed to use views that have been created by the site’s developers. However, the site plans to roll out an API in the near future which will allow users to create their own views, and eventually hopes to make a WYSIWYG “View Maker” that will allow anyone to create their own views.
In practice Viewzi did a pretty good job at determining which View corresponded to a search term, though it wasn’t perfect. My biggest problem with the site at this point is that some of the views are pure eyecandy, offering little in the way of useful information. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - I enjoy eyecandy just as much as the next guy. But it feels like a few of the views are sacrificing function for good looks (Gadget View, for example, is almost useless).
Viewzi competes with a number of other visual search engines, including SearchMe. Their custom aggregated search is similar to Rollyo.
Any invite code from TechCrunch to test Viewzi in private beta? Viewzi sounds very interesting.
A problem I found with the search interface is the seeming inability to serialize searches easily, without “wasted” searches, due to the interface design.
Start by searching for “Crater Lake.” Pick photo view. Yay, pretty pictures! Ok, but now try to switch to a 4-source search for “Murphy Brown.” You either have to type “Murphy Brown” and hit enter, letting it look for (limited, there’s no search of Google Images) pictures of Murphy Brown before then clicking on photo view, or click on the 4-source view while Crater Lake is up, starting another wasted search before you can type “Murphy Brown” and hit enter.
Of course, the fix would be really simple: there’s already a drop-down for the search button, but all it lets you do is choose to start over. List the view templates there! Don’t be so proud of that visual display of views that you force it on people at the expense of productivity. (This is why I still mostly use Google, after being in the beta for a while. Sorry.)
Found this from their twitter account http://twitter.com/viewzi : viewzi - A new way to search. Use “twitter” as your referral code for access. http://viewzi.com/invites !!
Also, you might want to see twitter search on TechCrunch at http://www.viewzi.com/search/techcrunch/twitter !!
According to Viewzi it will go public today and you will NOT have to login.
Just got a mail from Giovanni Gallucci from Viewzi saying:
“Today is a big day for us! We’re “taking down the wall” from Viewzi by removing the requirement for users to log in to be able to search. Anyone and everyone will have full, unfettered access to the beta site!”
From the description of the search engine capability at Viewzi, it looks like they’re using a guided search. Guided search (interactive search) is the step up from link-based search (Google PageRank and the likes) and content-based (latent semantic and the likes) which spit out everything all at once. Guided search allows the user and the engine to have a dialog. The user fire a short query to the engine and the engine retrieves documents that are relevant (ranking from highest to lowest). The user narrow down the search from the retrieved search, then the engine spits out the most relevant ones. So, this exchange does guide the user to the most appropriate topic that she/he is looking for. ICA (Independent Component Analysis) algorithm has been used in one of those guided search , which is described in the following paper:
Interactive Search Grouping - Search result grouping using Independent Component Analysis
The advantage of guided search, is that sometimes the retrieved results in using Google for example, the most relevant ones to the query could be buried deep on the 8th page or further back, but guided search can lead the user to those deep relevant pages, since most users do hardly go further than the 5th page or so.
Christian,
The wall comes down this evening.
-giovanni
markzero,
You have hit on an interesting point. We will be addressing this in the near future by allowing users to set default views for searches.
-giovanni
I got in because of curiosity…There is a lot of eye candy, but really I don’t want to spend serious time checking out some 20 different views just because someone has created them! The title is some what telling..the ridiculous part.
I have to do searches all day so Viewzi was really useful and fun for me. I have tested a few of the engines attempting to do the same thing, and Viewzi was hands down the best.
It brought life into the mundane task of searching and did not slow my pc to a crawl. I can not wait to see how they refine it in the successive versions.
I have also tested it and have written a review about it here:
http://pixelsebi.com/2008-06-0.....searching/
Karter, you don’t HAVE to check out all the views for each search term. Only the ones you want. And when the views are designed well, they are really good. The music search view is the best way to find browser-playable music I’ve seen so far, for example. It starts with a page of clickable links to play music. If you try to click on a link and the song is no longer at the linked site, the page makes that link go away. When music starts playing, it’s got a big progress bar. It’s very unfussy, otherwise.
To check out the site, click here (for now this is the only way into the site, you’re free to adjust the search term and view mode once you’re in).
(not so fast there buddy)
you can also get access to the site THIS way
http://www.viewzi.com/search/4.....EnginesWeb
It certainly is an ambitious project - but the bells and whistles are only for broadband users and those with fairly powerful computers - the rest will have to use the simple text SERPs
I have never figured this out, so please somebody explain it to me. Why launch a service, announce it to the world, and then say that you need an invite, or a login, blah blah blah. Sucks! If you are not ready, don’t go out and waste peoples time. More and more startups are doing this and its driving me nuts.
I did watch their video and while their service seems better than SearchMe, it is not even close to the experience that Piclens from Cooliris provides. I sticking to PicLens for now - heck, I don’t need an invite from them.
Jessica,
All points well taken.
1) Why require a login to get to the engine after we announce it to the world? I can’t speak to the reasons why other companies have done this, but in our case it was to manage the scaling issues we were anticipating with the new site. We’ve gotten great feedback from our beta users which has allowed us to fix issues that would not have been found if we had opened up the site two months ago w/o the data we collected in the private beta program.
2) Why announce it to the world? Well…that’s how we get beta testers
3) Actually, you don’t have to log in… in the article above there is a direct into the site: http://www.viewzi.com/search/techcrunch/iphone
4) The login is disappearing this evening as we are closing the private beta period.
-Hope you enjoy the engine.
-giovanni
Interesting…it definitely looks entertaining and very creative, but just from the iphone search it’s throwing up some results that are pretty much 100% irrelevant (egg salad sandwich in recipe view?).
Something to keep an eye on, but I don’t think it will be taking Google’s place quite yet!
Is Viewzi building a search engine from scratch, or are they applying an interesting UI to other engines’ results?
Jason,
We are not crawling/cataloging the web. We take publicly available APIs and other data sources and add a layer of intelligence on top of them along with an enhanced UI.
-giovanni
viewzi evangelist
twitter.com/giovanni
i am a beta user there in viewzi
its nice. seems its fully done in flash.