I noted with interest that Microsoft has announced a new feature in its Bing search engine, focused on visual searches. You can try it here (note that it requires you to have Silverlight installed). Like some of the dedicated visual search engines, it presents a way to do web searches by clicking through collected visual images, instead of entering keywords. Initially, it’s only available for certain types of search categories.
To perform searches, you start with a category such as “Digital Cameras,” where a search will present you with a large tapestry of individual photos of camera; a portion of the digital camera-related results is shown below. Clicking on any camera in the tapestry will take you to dedicated search results for that camera. This seems, in particular, to be a good search metaphor for, say, shopping for tech products online, where the look of the product might matter a lot to you. For general use, though, there are some other visual search engines that I favor.
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Graphical and visual search engines are always interesting to me as alternatives to Google. I find that for certain types of searches, especially if I’m say, researching new hardware technology, or scanning headlines that happen to come from unusual sources, the extremely text-heavy way in which Google returns results can be sub-optimal.
In this post, you’ll find four good tools that provide useful, offbeat approaches to visual searches.
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As search engines continue to proliferate on the web, sites that aggregate results from many engines do too. Especially for doing comparisons on things like technology products you may be interested in purchasing, or comparing news results from various sites, this can be very handy. You can also often save time because of the sheer number of results you tend to get back in one view.
Here are four useful sites that specialize in this, all from different angles.
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Visual web search tools have been around for a while, with long-standing sites such as Kartoo providing graphical views of search results. These are sometimes useful and sometimes just gimmicks, but Viewzi and Redzee are two sites that may appeal to many web workers.
The idea behind these sites is to shake up the model for viewing search results, potentially allowing you to discover information you wouldn’t find with, say, a standard Google search.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
