A company profile that was just submitted: Middlespot, another startup taking a crack at making the web search experience more visual, joining the likes of SearchMe, Snap and Viewzi.
Like its counterparts, Middlespot aims to enhance searching for websites, images, news, Amazon and even Twitter by returning screenshots of results rather than just text links.
Kicking off a keyword-based search opens two columns: to the left, you’ll get standard stuff like title, summary and full link, and on the right you’ll get a visual representation of search results. In the latter column, you can make the frames bigger or smaller by using the slider or scrolling your mouse wheel, and hovering over the boxes will highlight them and offer a couple of options. It’s all pretty straightforward, so check it out.
Next to visual search, Middlespot is also somewhat of a social bookmarking service, since it lets you save search results in a so-called ‘workpad’, an extra layer that saves your favorited pages and wraps a number of social services around them, like commenting, sharing via e-mail and embedding (see below). It lets you rename the workpad results, add a custom URL and also offers related search results on-site. If you register for an account, you can backup your workpad, but if you note your workpad ID elsewhere you don’t even have to do that since you can fetch the saved results later. Last but not least, Middlespot offers a number of tools like bookmarklets and browser plugins that make it easier to remember to use the service when looking for something on the web.
The problem with Middlespot is that its overall website design is below par, and it’s horribly slow with current response times that will prove to be unacceptable for the majority of people who are used to getting search results much faster. But since Middlespot is just two guys doing this in their spare time, those gripes feel like splitting hairs and frankly it’s impressive what they’ve built without a dime of funding and limited time resources.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
http://www.snap.com
Of course, added!
Perhaps you should also add http://www.yauba.com which also uses a consolidated visual search interface for websites, images, videos and social networks?
CPO RJ Garbowicz was asked what is YourNight.com, he responded, “Picture this; you get home from work in the evenings and you turn on your PC, what do you do . . . answer email . . . browse your social networking or dating site . . . play online games . . . search videos and music . . . shop online . . . peruse job listings . . . check out local events . . . search for a business . . . go to your online banking . . . well you get the point, YourNight.com affords you all of this, and much, much more – all within one colossal, user-friendly portal . . . that’s all I can say for now, since we are still in stealth mode . . . however, as soon as we complete our Series A capital raise of $10 million our purpose and presence will be known.”
For more information, please contact:
RJ Garbowicz President/CPO Extreme Enterprises, Inc.
Phone:727.289.5522
Email:RJ@eeihq.com
PO Box 49271
St Petersburg, FL 33743
Ugly website. Fail.
Pretty impressive. Once they’ve built a reasonable cache it also should be faster. Needs a lot of processing power tho.
Welcome to the World of Visual Search Engine. Hope the service is good
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http://www.smartbloggerz.com
I like the implementation, and it works fine on my 2GB laptop with broadband connection.
Is that the same laptop you use to shamelessly spam Techcrunch? Idiot.
hey there Typhoon, it seems like your site have some virus/Worm!
Nice detail: you can zoom thumbnails in and out with your mousewheel.
And refocuses too! Which helps a little bit for glancing through the different pages…
Nice post! Also check out my blog/podcast at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
at least the other spammers say something interesting…
Very interesting.. It’s always nice to have other options.
Yes, we definitely need more innovation and competition in search. Over the past 2 years, I feel that browsers have made tremendous improvements, but search much less so.
I think visual search and Middlespot are great ideas. However, increasingly more people–at least in India–are accessing Internet through their mobile phones. I worry that the thumbnails may be too small to see on even the best mobile devices.
At any rate, hurray for more competition in this space.
“we definitely need more innovation and competition in search” Agree….
Do we need a spammer from India to remind us?
Nope.
@Nadia,
Are you Nadia Nyce? Glad to see you here.
very cool idea. seems like the main advantage of this site is that you can browse visually without having to read the descriptions of the sites on the left if you don’t want to.
i’d like to see a site that takes advantage of the same idea but applies it to visually browsing amazon or youtube. something like this concept video:
http://www.yout...h?v=5qZsf0d7TrQ
Site seems to be broken (at least in firefox). The screen shot looks pretty much like the other sites you mentioned. Sigh.
This tool is awesome, I checked it out and it is so cool. I am using this search engine from now. The design is great and I really love it.
Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
great alternative visual search engine.
Good idea, poor implementation
http://technoci...izen.tumblr.com
Any idea if this is powered by Yahoo Boss?
Thanks for the feedback. Just a bit more background on what we’ve done. We built middlespot.com using only javascript, php, and ajax. We’d love to give it a facelift but we’ve been focused on the features and functionality. Definitely something we want to work on. To answer a few questions, yes we are using YahooBOSS but strongly considering switching to Microsoft live API 2.0. Also, we use APIs from insuggest, drop.io, twitter, and amazon. Please keep the feedback coming. or email us directly at support@middlespot.com
sorry, also wanted to apologize for the slow performance this morning. We weren’t expecting the traffic so middlespot.com would have been very slow. We’ve added some amazon instances and it should perform better for everyone now.
Thanks for the info Scott! Impressive start. Good luck with the service!
this sounds like a really cool idea, but there will no doubtedly be a lot of updates to get it right. it would just seem to me that there will be a lot of room for improvement on an idea that tries to pull people away from google. big ontaking.
before funding,I think consider this work build the site as Hobby, i think is so positive to keep the “spare time valuable,and since they are not supported by angel investor yet,I think this techcrunch already make them alert that it has talent here>need to “improve
try alternative business search engine
http://www.busiverse.com
Next step…check the 3Ps for Potential Spam: Pill, Poker, Porn….Visuals are good but if you can’t solve spam and latency, you won’t get any market share
check out http://www.gurutoy.com. excellent design, easy to use and upload. click “explore” to see the latest links. everyone should upload their sites and blogs and vids(point to vids).