Viewzi Offers New Look at Visual Search - A Search With a View
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Viewzi is actually a search aggregator with a variety of visual interfaces. It limits its search to the sites most likely to be relevant to what you're looking for. How does it figure that out? That information is proprietary. But you can also choose the views you want to use manually.
I wish I could show you a video of Viewzi in action; static images aren't going to do it justice. After you put in your search query, you're brought to a screen that shows you 16 different kinds of search views. They're not all on the screen at once, however; they're in a long ribbon that only shows four views at a time. The ribbon moves depending on where you put your mouse, so you can go back and forth smoothly along its length. Want to take a closer look at what one of the views offers? Hover your mouse over it, and that view gets larger.
If you want a little more control, there's a translucent slider that lets you move the ribbon more directly. Here's an image to show you what I mean about the ribbon and the slider (cropped again; you can actually see slightly more views per screen than I'm showing here):
See that slider at the bottom? It doesn't produce the blue arrows on the sides unless you hover over it. If you look closely, you can just make out the darker “dots” within the slider. Each one stands for a view, and the ones that are visible on your screen are the ones that the slider is hovering over.
Now I'm going to show you what happens when you hover your cursor over a view.
The view gets nice and big, and gives you some additional information. While you could always see the name of the view, hovering over it tells you the exact sources that Viewzi searches. For the Basic Photo View shown here, for example, Viewzi searches Flickr and Riya.
So it's worth keeping in mind that when you choose a particular view, you also choose where to search. This means you might want (or need) to perform several searches to find something. That shouldn't be too much of a problem, though; as other reviewers have observed, Viewzi's interface is very smooth and fun to play with.
Next: Choosing a View >>
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