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

Something to keep an eye on, but I don’t think it will be taking Google’s place quite yet!

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.view...chcrunch/iphone

4) The login is disappearing this evening as we are closing the private beta period.

-Hope you enjoy the engine.

-giovanni

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.

(not so fast there buddy)
you can also get access to the site THIS way

http://www.view...earchEnginesWeb

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

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.

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

The wall comes down this evening.

-giovanni

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.

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!”

Also, you might want to see twitter search on TechCrunch at http://www.view...hcrunch/twitter !!

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.)