Viewzi: What’s So Special About This Search Engine?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 22 of April , 2008 at 1:10 pm

It seems that there’s a new search engine startup every week. Everybody wants in on the search engine game, either to topple the king of search - Google - or just to make some money and capitalize on an ever-growing industry. Whatever the motives, there are some of the new startups that are worth trying, but others leave something to be desired.

The latest trend in search engines seems to be visual search results or video results. One such search engine was SearchMe. Now, a similar concept has come along called Viewzi.

Viewzi is still in beta. I had a chance to take it for a test drive, but I wasn’t impressed. Most of the results seem to come straight out of Google and Yahoo!, but you have to wait for the pages to transfer data in order to get the full benefit. One cool thing about Viewzi you can choose the type of view that your results are shown in, and there are several options offered, including:

• Text View
• Photo View
• Web Screenshot View
• Video View
• Among others

Unfortunately, all the results show on one page so the load time is tremendously slow. In text view, for instance, I got over 150 results for the first search I made and after a couple of minutes the results were still loading. That’s frustrating for a user. While I wait for my browser to interpret the information, I can’t do anything else. Now I know why the major search engines only include 10 results per page.

One view borrows the 3D scrolling screenshot concept of SearchMe. Not a bad idea really, but I don’t find it all that helpful since I have to scroll through every single screenshot just to see which results are available, unlike the text view that at least allows me to see multiple results at one time. In terms of adding visual search results to the SERP, I think that Ask has done the best job in making search more visual with its Ask 3D product. But I really see nothing special about the new search startups attempting to make search more visual.

Category: Search Engines

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