How To

Viewzi Takes a Visual Approach to Web Search.

By Brad Groux ⋅ May 28, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

Alexander Muse of the Texas Startup Blog sent out a Twitter alert earlier about an amazing new search startup called Viewzi. The site which officially launches next week offers unique visual ways to sort through your web searches. Pulling in data from various other search engines such as Google, Live and Yahoo Viewzi offers visual aides and previews of your searches rather than your basic text results. If you’ve ever used iTunes/iPhone Coverflow interface Viewzi will look pretty familiar, it is a brilliant idea and one I can’t believe hasn’t been used before… frankly I’m jealous I didn’t think about it.

When you enter a search keyword or phrase (I of course first searched "Nine Inch Nails") Viewzi allows you to choose how you’d like to browse your results via a coverflow-like interface, including but not limited to:

01. MP3 Search View
02. Web Screenshot View
03. 4 Sources View (Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo)
04. Video x3 View (BlinkX, Veoh and YouTube)
05. Basic Photo View (Flickr and Riya)
06. Simple Text View (Compete.com, Google and Yahoo)
07. Celebrity Photo View (Google Images and Just Jared)
08. Reuters News View
09. Everyday Shopping View (Amazon, Ebay, Target, Walmart)
10. The Weather View
11. TechCrunch (CrunchBase, TechCrunch)
12. Amazon Book View

It is pretty amazing; each one of the options above gives you a completely new way to view your results… the most impressive of which are the Video x3 and Celebrity Photo. With Video x3 the results are pulled from all three of the video sites and begin to auto play without sound in three rows, it is very impressive to see. With the Celebrity Photo View you can click and drag the photos around like you would if the pictures were printed out and laying on your coffee table… it makes searching actually fun. The Web Screenshot view will get a lot of use as well as you get a full preview of the page before actually going to it, so your back and forward browser buttons will probably get a lot less use now.

I could go on describing the other aspects for hours because they are all so intuitive, but I’ll leave the exploring up to you. Overall I think Viewzi has a bright future ahead of it… I doubt they’ll overtake Google but the site has great promise. It’ll be interesting to see how many of the different search result features catch on and how they evolve the current ones while thinking of even bigger and better ones down the road. I know I’ve spent the past few hours just toying around and extremely impressed with the design and ease of use. I can honestly say that I will continue to use this search as it helps me come across things I’d never noticed with a basic text result, hopefully people will give this technology a chance.

The site doesn’t actually go live until June 9th but via a promotion with Dallas’s CBS11TV Viewzi is offering a special promotion code for closed sine-up; simply enter referral code cbs11… I’d jump on the bandwagon quickly though as they make no mention of just how many signups they are allowing with the code; and with the news looking to hit Digg’s front page soon they may go very quickly over the next 12-24 hours. If for some reason you can’t get in on the closed preview or if you’d like to know more, head to Viewzi.TV where they have a handful of videos showing you the ropes.

Tags: Google, Internet, iTunes, Live, MSN, Search, Viewzi, Yahoo