Middlespot May Hit Search Sweet Spot - Searching With Middlespot
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I've been intrigued by the steampunk subculture and steampunk costumes lately, so I figure that's as good a place to start as any. Many costumers will spend months putting together just the right look. So what does Middlespot turn up for a search on steampunk?
Well, the first thing I noticed about doing my search is that the site is very slow. No, I mean VERY slow. Middlespot may have been having problems at their end (I checked my end and everything was working), or it may be the nature of the beast. You see, Middlespot doesn't just return links. It's a visual search engine. In this case, that means it also returns screen shots. And by default, it returns 2.5 times as many results on its first page as the major search engines; add in that many screen shots, and you can see why it would take a while to load. Let me show you:
On the left side you see the familiar list of links that you'll find in any search engine, with some of its material rearranged. The link is at the end of each entry; it starts with the item's title and includes a blurb from the page, with your search term in bold. To the right, however, are screen shots from each page.
You probably noticed the orange rectangles. They match up the link with the screen shot, so you get a preview of where you want to go. You can change the item that is highlighted by either hovering over a new screen shot or clicking on the general area of the text related to the link. This may be why Middlespot puts the links at the bottom (rather than the top) of each entry on the left, in fact - to avoid having users unintentionally click away from the site. (You do have to click twice on links and/or screen shots to go to search results, however). I did find that being able to change the screen shot just by hovering over a new one was a bit distracting; it caused the highlighted shot to change more quickly and often than I'd intended. Regaining the right shot was no big deal, however.
By default, Middlespot returns 25 results per page, but you can increase that to 50. You probably noticed that the screen shots seem to scroll off the right side of the screen. Do you find that distracting? It's fixable. If you look near the top left of the screen shot plane, you will notice a control that looks like this:
The slider with the plus and minus signs controls the size of the screen shots. You can make them small enough for you to take in all 25 at a glance. The arrows, meanwhile, provide you with another way to navigate through the images. As you would expect, each time you move to a different image, the focus of the orange rectangle on both sides (link and screen shot) changes appropriately.
By the way, if you get stuck, I strongly suggest clicking on the "tips" link that you'll find at the upper right of each pane. It shows you how to manipulate and navigate through the interface if you don't like the default presentation. I'll talk more about the help screens in the second part of this review.
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