On Visual Search Engines

My mom sent me a link to Searchme.com yesterday. I had heard about this being in secure beta testing, but wasn't aware it was now open for regular viewing.

If you've never checked it out, it's probably worth a quick test drive. It's not necessarily anything revolutionary, but it caters to those who love to browse through something more visual than a big list of hyperlinks and meta descriptions.



The Likes:

• It's just plain beautiful. It's fast on my G5. The icons to sort subjects that can be taken in many ways is both helpful and beautiful.


• I dig that it highlights your search term right on the actual screen capture. It's something I've not seen with other visual search providers.


• I enjoy the iTunes like presentation style and like that you can skin it to a light or dark setting.


• The meta description data still pops up if you hover over the visual window.

The Dislikes:

• I get that it's still Beta, but there are clearly problems with the search algorithms within this search engine. As I normally do with any new search engine I get a look at, I used my last name as the initial search test. I was sort of shocked to see that a lot of the results were really old... digging up stuff that I was connected to in the late 90s and early part of 2002 and 2003. It only had one connection to my recent work - which was my editor's letter in Cobalt Mag. I get that it's beta, but it didn't even pick up Danieleizans.com.


• I'm left underwhelmed with the use of flash. It's nice, but they could have jazzed it up and done something at least a little bit different than the same cover switch that iTunes uses. The visual style is not impressive enough to make me want to ditch Google. I do love the use of icons to narrow the search down though. That's quite impressive.


• Finally, I'm left wondering why they didn’t partner with Google to drive the queries. It's not as if that wheel was broken. It seems it would have been just as easy to put the pretty paper on the best tool out there.

Overall verdict: I'm reasonably impress, but won't switch my daily engine, but this is nice for people who might not remember anything about a site aside from what it looked like. It's stunning in the way it gives me ideas for digital magazine presentations and for anyone who wants to have more fun with a search engine, but I think these visual search engines are a bit campy.

Incommunicado

On the iPod - "Incommunicado" - Harvey Danger

Wow. I've been Incommunicado for a long time now. I'm very sorry, but I haven't been feeling too well, have had to deal with a little bit of drama. I just don't understand how something joyous can be made to be so uncomfortable at times.

At any rate, I haven't been slacking. I've been working a lot within the Saxotexh language with the company's CCE (custom content engine) module. It's fairly flexible for something that is based in the CMS (content management system) world.

Also, on the design front, I've been getting interested in more Japanese designers. I've become slightly enamored with a designer and artist,Nagi Noda. He creates some interesting stuffed animals, graphics, mobile phone applications and steel work.

More tomorrow.

X's and O's