I have been looking into visual search recently, and I have been disappointed with what I have found. The observer last Sunday talked about some sites to watch, one of which was Cooliris. This site offers a new cinematic way to discover the web, by browsing through the web’s images.
Perhaps I am behind the times but I thought it was rather useless. Yes, you can browse images, but these images are separate from the context of their pages and I am not sure how, therefore this helps people do anything more than flick through images, like Google images search but without the context.
A slightly more interesting site is searchme. This enable people to browse through a stack of images of webpages, giving a quick preview of each one. I like the idea here, but I think that the user experience is rather clunky when switching between viewing the picture of the webpage and viewing the page in a browser. The search results are also pretty underwhelming .
Pixsta is a nice product which allows companies to advertise their product in a visual product search engine. there is a good idea here somewhere, but at the moment not enough information is rally given about the product to bring the experience alive.
If you found this post useful, why not buy me a coffee!
