Imagine your ideal vacation escape. For some this may entail hiking the Appalachian Trail in Asheville, for others standing atop Peak 9 in Breckenridge on a cold, sunny morning. Perhaps the perfect vacation for you is figuring out a way to see every sight in Disney’s Magic Kingdom, or making certain that you see nothing at all but the ocean and the sun. Those who find it easy to imagine the idyllic, but lack the desire to put their thoughts into words are now in luck. Hotels.com now provides a search process that appeals to the senses and allows vacationers to dream their way into vacationing with “The Visualiser“. >>Full Story

Thoughts// Hotels.com is beta testing a visual search tool, Hotel Visualizer, in the UK market which helps consumers find their "perfect hotel" based on:  what you want to do on vacation (hiking, beach, clubbing etc.), who you're traveling with (family, couple etc.), what kind of room style (luxury, bohemian etc.) and your age.

Designed much like Travelocity's Experience Finder, it's an "inspiration tool" for consumers in the research phase (appx. 30% of OTA consumers) that uses photography as a visual cue to discern the motivations and aspirations of the consumer, thereby enabling the system to suggest relevant content (destinations/hotels).

Based on my answers when using the visualizer today, it classifies me a Socialite which they defined as:

"You're a real social animal and it seems like this trip is all about having a fun time with your partner. We’ve found some hotels that will be the perfect base for all your frolics! You’ll be right in the centre of the action and all set for feeling the buzz of the place.  When it comes to evening entertainment, you'll be sure to find what you're after, whether its the perfect restaurant for a romantic dinner or a pumping bar where you can let your hair down."

Amsterdam, Auckland, Barcelona, & Montreal were my recommended destinations (Interestingly...I've always dreamed of retiring in Barcelona!).

The visualizer seems like a really fun planning tool and much more engaging way to help consumers discover new places and things to do; more importantly, it represents a continuing evolution of the current commoditized travel booking market.  My one disappointment with the experience however would be the photography; too many of the photos weren't inspiring and looked most definitely like stock photos!

"Searchme employs Adobe Flash and Flex to create a user interface that displays results as web page screenshots. the effect is similar to the Cover Flow feature in iTunes, where users "flip through" album cover art (...) The perk of this technology is the ability to see a page before visiting it."

Read Nathania Johnson's post, "Visual Search Engine Searchme Launches Private Beta," on Searchenginewatch.

http://www.searchme.com/

Searchme's beta version was released in March of this year. The company's developers have worked closely with Adobe's team to deliver a user experience resembling Apple's cover flow UI. As a result, you can conduct a pleasant and fast visual search without having to click back and forth through links and pages. Once you see the page for the site you are interested in, then click on it for a new browser tab to take you directly to that site. This gets even better when searching long tail content. Give it a try, videos play instantaneously on the center of the screen as you browse.

The more user friendly your browsing experience becomes, the more able you are to comfortably process and enjoy more and more content. By the same token, when applied to enterprise class applications the expected outcome is higher productivity levels.

When thinking of what's next, eventually we might experience this kind of visual search combined with multitouch interfaces to be able to quickly browse through the stack of pages as well as to zoom in and out as needed. This UI paradigm has been made popular by Apple's iPhone and HP has already launched a multitouch desktop available at consumer electronic stores this year.

One would think that mulitouch does not make much sense if you are not really close enough to touch the screen, think of a TV set in a living room. So, there is research being done out there on mid air interface technologies which can leverage the same set of gestures without making you physically touch a screen.

Related links:

• The next generation browsing at your finger tips
• New search engine: CUIL
• Multitouch, TouchSmart, Lucid Touch

José de Francisco López
Chicago, IL     25 Sep 08

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Canadian visual search outfit Incogna have taken an interesting approach to image processing, from what I can tell building their image search indexes using massively parallel GPUs. Asking around the team, that technique has anecdotally produced some very successful tests, so I'll be keeping an eye on these guys in future.

Sputtr.com allows you to search all your favourite sites from one simple home page. The interface is clean and highly visual with icons delineating search pages rather than text.

By registering with Sputtr.com you have the chance to customize your own search page

• Drag-and-drop existing button icons using the small 'hand'
• Remove existing buttons by clicking the 'close' button next to them
• Add completely new buttons using the 'Add Buttons' drop-down list
• Submit a new search Engine to Sputtr.com for review and implementation

Impressive list of search engines already in the customizable list including search sites for maps, images, videos, blogs, technology, torrents, people and social networks.

Certainly a visually appealing site with many benefits for those wishing to search specific domains. Very simple to use, easy to set-up, highly customizable and rapid. Sputtr is also available in 8 different languages such as french, dutch, spanish, Italian

Essentially, they bring back screen shots of sites that have the word or phrase that you are looking for highlighted on the page. You can scroll through the pages and then click into the page once you have found the one that matched what you are looking for. See screenshot below:

Searchme and others like Viewzi get it. People are inundated with the many text results that come back with Google. These companies also have a really easy to use front end for the iPhone.

Check out these sites and let me know what you think:

www.searchme.com

www.viewzi.com

SearchMe

• Search Accuracy       ♥♥♥
• Search Visuals          ♥♥♥♥
• Search Functionality ♥♥♥♥

Beautiful public beta site which allows the user to explore web results in full size text and image pages - scroll through the page results, review the associated text and add to your stacks.

The 'stack options' allow the user to pick up web pages from the 'scroll view' and drop them into a named stack such as the latest news in technology, then save your stacks, share with your friends, add more to the stack or keep on searching. A beautiful visual search experience which can include static pages and video from sites such as YouTube.

Quintura Search

• Search Accuracy        ♥♥♥♥
• Search Visuals           ♥♥♥♥
• Search Functionality  ♥♥♥

Amazing beta concept site for visual search using word association to refine search results. From an initial keyword it is possible to scroll over the associated 'floating' keywords to choose the best string for the ultimate search result. Works rapidly to reduce the word cloud to workable constraints. I was so taken by this search engine that I embedded it into my own website...

Quintura has just been voted in the top ten search services by PCMag.com - very special as it is the only non-US origin search portal in the elite group

Tag Galaxy

• Search Accuracy        ♥♥♥♥
• Search Visuals           ♥♥♥♥
• Search Functionality  ♥♥♥♥

Still not satisfied? Try an amazing Flickr photo search with this inspirational piece of application programming for the ultimate in visual searching experience.

Just enter the keyword for the images you seek - then explore the planets in this cosmic engine with high visual appeal

SearchMe shows the results of a search in a rolodex format (using Adobe Flash). A photo of each page returned form the elements in the rolodex. There is a dragging bar using which you can flip through the rolodex. You can also use the mouse wheel or the arrow keys on your keyboard. Quite interesting to say the least. The rolodex display however has a disadvantage. A user can see only limited results on the screen at once. Worry not for SearchMe has a solution. Right below the dragbar is a small button clicking which the screen splits horizontally. On the top is the rolodex view and at the bottom is the more conventional search results in a list. These two views are connected. So if you use the rolodex at the top, the list at the bottom scrolls accordingly and vice versa. Nice feature.

SearchMe introduces the concept of search stacks. A stack is basically a set of search results. So if you want to create a list of some of the result items, all you do is drag and drop them onto a new stack. Afterwards, you can browse through the stacks that you created.

The home page of SearchMe is pretty spartan with a search box and list of some of the popular stacks. While typing in a search term SearchMe displays relevant categories in a horizontal list right below the search box. Quite useful.

Here's a video that gives you a demo of the search engine, but I suggest that you take a look at it for yourself at http://www.searchme.com.

Give it a try today!  Searchme Visual Search - Beta - rev. 1.090

Searchme Visual Search - Beta - rev. 1.090

The first one is a visual search engine called SearchMe which provides categories as and when you type your search string. Say you type the word Liverpool - what you get are categories like sports, business, weather, history, libraries etc. Once you select a category you are provided with relevant pages relating to the selected category. But that's not the best part. What's so different about this search engine is that you can actually get a full preview of all page results in the form of a slideshow-like photo album. It's still in beta stage but I suggest you take a look yourself http://www.searchme.com

The second link which I really liked is MoshiMonster. It's basically a game where you adopt a friendly monster and take care of it - like a virtual pet. It wasn't the concept which impressed me - rather it was the way the website has been designed - asthetically pleasing and very user friendly. It's a pleasure - the signing-up process is fun - take a look http://www.moshimonsters.com

In a market where Microsoft is facing difficulty in competing with Google, a new entrant to the Internet search scene has unveiled itself, it is Cuil  (www.cuil.com)

Cuil was founded in 2005, and funded with $33 million dollars by 3 different venture capitalist firms, and opened to the public today the 28th of July 2008.

Cuil the latest internet search engine was engineered by ex googlers, and claims it can index pages cheaper and faster than google. Cuil claims it already indexes 121,617,892,992 web pages

Cuil has a very simple design similar but different than google in its more sophisticated simple business appealing look. All search results are displayed accompanied by a picture. You can choose whether you want your results to appear in 2 or 3 column format, and there is a preferences section where you can turn on the safe search and the typing suggestions options

Cuil will eventually serve ads, but they have launched the site with no ads for now.

They also offer tab suggestions (topics related to your search) and a Categories section with even more suggestions.

Cuil seems to have already have an agreement with Mozilla, as they have a link to add Cuil to your Firefox browser, and it doesn't show this in Internet Explorer.

Cuil believes that:

Size Matters

Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them, even if it’s not popular. Existing technology can’t keep up with the increasing volume of Web pages. If a search engine is incapable of indexing the Internet properly how can it hope to provide accurate search results? Imagine if the phone company decided to stop listing infrequently called numbers in the phone book. Maybe no one phones your grandmother much, but if her friend from the old neighborhood wants to get in touch, shouldn’t her number be in the book? Cuil lists all the numbers, even the ones that aren’t called much. Because one day someone will need that number.

Popularity is useful, but not always important.

Popularity is useful, but has dominated search results so heavily that it gets harder and harder to find the page you want, especially if your search is a complex one. Cuil respects popular pages and recognizes that for many simple searches, popularity is an easy answer to your question. But for a deeper search, establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game. Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyze the rest of the content on those pages. During this analysis we discover that your keywords have different meanings in different contexts. Once we’ve established the context of the pages, we’re in a much better position to help you in your search.

Organization is fundamental

The Internet is information; usually too much. Ten blue links is a simple concept which fails to reflect the huge diversity and variety of information available to you on the Web. Cuil organizes the Internet so you can find the information you want. We separate different ideas from each other so you can choose the one that interests you. We pick images to illustrate the idea behind each page to aid you in your choice. We include roll-over definitions and offer you ideas to refine your search. We can do all this because we believe that information is only useful when it’s sorted. Cuil’s goal is to guide you towards answers to the questions you’re not even sure how to ask.

Cuil analyzes the Web, not the people

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service. Because Cuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don’t need to know your search history and habits. So our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don’t need to keep logs of our users’ search activity, so we don’t. For further details, read our Privacy Policy. Don’t worry, it’s short and to the point. No legal mumbo-jumbo.

As for Google, they announced on their official blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ the following on the 25th of July

Excerpt from Google Blog

"We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!"

Was the date for this announcement a coincidence or was is a direct hit to the upcoming search portal.
Only time will prove who will be the better search engine?

But upon clicking a trusty Ebsco database, what shall appear? A new look, an unfamiliar database. In these few moments of blinding terror my fears began to materialize...would I stagger through this session leaving the patron unsatisfied with her database introduction and I scrambling for cover?

Egads, I thought aloud, while inwardly struggling to get a grip on what professionalism was left of the situation. Must be Ebsco's switch to its new interface, I stammered. Strange that it had to happen at the very moment I was demonstrating the basics of simple searching.

Steeling my resolve I proceeded to instructually technologize until sufficiently confident the patron was prepared. Afterwards I made a more thorough investigation of the new look, and so I have found:

• simplified interface, though seeming stretched. At the very top of the screen one will find the options for publication, cited references and subject terms searches. Don't know why it was placed at the top...maybe they could have been placed strategically under the main search box next to the advanced, visual and search alert options.
• more intriguingly, the addition of the "visual search" is a nice touch. After initial confusion of wanting to search within the visual area, the user is able to build upon their search simply by scrolling with the mouse to find subjects and articles in a hierarchical manner with a minimum of clicks.
• more thumbnails and image options highlighted. Kinda resembles a Yahoo! or Google News search retrieval.
• the options for opening full-text in pdf or html, as well as the options for saving, exporting, citing in various formats and adding to a folder are definitely more predominantly placed, both at the top and bottom of the citation records.

Overall, not a whole has changed with the functionality, but in an effort to make researchers less intimidated, Ebsco has certainly emphasized the older features in a shinier display...bolder and more interactive scrolling.

Definitely worth looking at before those instructional sessions start.

My question is just how are these image recognition companies survive? Isn't this a function that Nokia should (and will) incorporate in their phones.

1 I put a simple text request with the word 'barbara', which is just a female name, nothing else. With Picollator, I obtained following results:

[wp_caption id="attachment_34" align="alignnone" width="420" caption="text search using the word barbara at picollator.com"][/wp_caption]

Compare them to ones from famous conventional text search system:

[wp_caption id="attachment_35" align="alignnone" width="420" caption="text search using the word barbara at other web search system"][/wp_caption]

[wp_caption id="attachment_36" align="alignnone" width="420" caption="text search using the word sam at picollator.com"][/wp_caption]

[wp_caption id="attachment_33" align="alignnone" width="420" caption="text search using the word sam at other search engine"][/wp_caption]

Thanks Viewzi, we love it!

The "stack" big reminds me of nothing more than a Windows drag-and-drop (particularly Power Desk, since I'm a devoted user and have been since the days of Windows 3.11 manipulable file displays disappeared and everything became much easier).  Well, much easier for everyone else.  I'm just stupid.  You can share stacks and it looks like you can store them with a profile.  I didn't give this a close look, because to me this is just another search engine in a market with heavy competition.  First looks are promising, and we'll see what's going on a year from now.

--Glenn

investigate which of these sites offers an interesting addition information dispensing. Read more....

]]> http://webmonkey.wordpress.com/?p=92 Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:40:30 +0000 webmonkey http://webmonkey.fa.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/visual-search-a-design-nightmare/ With visual search engines like Redzee appearing on the horizon, the nature of search will be changed. Right now, in regular search results, your site is represented as text consisting of the same alphabet as everyone else. Searchers have to read the description of your site to figure out if they would like to go there. By contrast, a visual search displays a screenshot of the resulting sites, giving the impression that you can tell which sites are better by looking at an image of the site that is reduced to 35% of it's original size. It is true that if you had been to a site before, but couldn't remember the exact URL and didn't bookmark it, you would be able to pick it out easier and faster than a regular search.

But visual search is a marketing bonanza that will be a design nightmare. Design changes will be requested to make the screenshot look more appealing at a reduced size. Pages will take on a more ad-like appearance, since getting people to look at your page is a desired effect, and just placing in the results will get eyes on your site. And if the screenshot is done in a certain manner, just ranking will get your advertising seen.

And how long will it take before pages are optimized to rank for a popular query just to splash spam in your face while you search? The problem is that an image is whatever you tell the machine it is. If you have an image of your product or service and tag it as 'free ip tv' then the machine has no recourse than to resort to your designation of what that image is. This is one reason why I don't trust it when any search engine says they are p*rn free. As long as the machines cannot tell that they are being lied to, people will lie to them.

This is not to say the results themselves aren't changing, but the format of results and the way a user interacts with them seems to have gotten stuck. Remember the early Google results, a white page with blue links. And what is it now again?

Of course, that simplicity coupled with relevant results propelled them to the top. But will that approach really last forever? Admittedly, Universal search brings image, maps, shopping, video, photo results etc, but the experience is pretty disjointed.

Let's say I want to research a Plasma TV to buy. A search on 'plasma tv' brings me retailer and manufacturer text listings, maps of installers near me, prices and spec in shopping, and some random user generated videos and photos of TV's.

But what if I want to see the latest Plasma TV's up close, spin it around, zoom in, look at the controls, all integrated with the price/spec/location of retailers etc. Off I go on a (potentially long) journey through the web until I find a site that can help.

Presenting more visual search results would seem an obvious way to step up the user experience in some cases. So perhaps the only thing that's holding back Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc. is figuring out how to integrate those handy sponsored links that drive $500 share prices.

I wouldn't doubt Google is looking at constantly improving results for users, but their commercial motive is ultimately to increase Adwords clicks rather than reduce them.

A couple of cool examples of image search results are below, from companies that don't have Google Adwords revenue to protect.

Image search links:
http://cooliris.com/
http://beta.searchme.com/Initial.html
http://www.like.com/

Google image search update:
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/04/google_refines.html
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3833337.ece

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