Tonight, thanks to Twitter 0-day information, I managed to snag an invite for beta-testing viewzi.com

Viewzi is a new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place.
Oh, and it’s bolder, richer, and more fun. 

That is certainly true, as the whole interface is very nice and, after a quick-run through the different views offered, the purpose of each becomes immediately obvious. Picture searches, video searches, shopping searches or just plain’ old trying-to-find-some-information searches.

Therein, however, I feel there may be a minor problem. I am not certain¹ how most people use Google, but for me it’s mostly to find new information. Things I don’t know. As it happens, a lot of times I want to find said things fast. So I require a certain degree of information overload. Things that Google can do, with its brief listings. I am sure the title-and-snippet approach of Google isn’t the best one; it certainly is not the friendliest one. However, for myself and the majority of people that search things on the web, Google does the job, largely because of its clutter-free interface.

Viewzi does have a “Simple Text View”, similar to the standard approach taken by other engines. 

This, from all those presented here, is one of the most suited formats for the “I don’t know what I want” kind of search. Every other kind of search is done well (excelling over competition by landslides) except that. Sure, you can do it, hoping that the cumulative score of Yahoo and Google indicate what the best results for your search are, but it does not allow for the kind of “result page dashing” some people depend upon. Generally, I don’t like to spend a lot of time in search; destinations are far more interesting. Though, with viewzi, you might forget you are just searching. The problem does stand: words or pictures? In some sense, they both may be as inappropriate when it comes to offering possible answers to the ideas you are searching for. Text, for most, is more descriptive. You can also fit more text on a page, which my point really boils down to: 16, 24 or 32 thumbnails of webpages with short text snippets are not really more helpful in finding something than 20 text links are. Short of the number of clicks, maybe.

On the flip side, pictures are quite suited to re-find something. That is why I believe SafariStand’s History Flow feature is brilliant, and in the 24 hours that I have known about it² I think it’s great. It is a great use of the technology³ in a way that makes it practical, not just ‘cool’.

Yes, History Flow is (kind of) from a different product category than viewzi, but the comparison does illustrate a point: Viewzi may very well become the thing when it comes to finding stuff you kind of know about already. I am just not so sure about the rest.

Everything else is great — product, video, picture searches. Reviews will most likely start pouring in during the (North American) day… which I hear is when most people around here are awake and conduct business. As more searches are performed on the site, the image caches will get primed⁴ and response time will get even better. When I tried it it did not feel slow at all, though it did refuse to load a small number of the screenshots⁵

I will use viewzi for searches in the next few days and maybe my first impressions about its potential shortcomings will change. I am certainly glad that more attempts are being made into this direction, because yes, I think there are quite a few aspects of search that can be improved.

1. Yes, I am, in fact, certain [↩]
2. I know, how lame of me to not be up to speed with things [↩]
3. Apple’s Cover Flow [↩]
4. My assumption [↩]
5. This should be mitigated shortly, as it is obvious that a visual search engine without pictures isn’t useful [↩]