In the first part of this article I introduced you to Viewzi, a visual search engine that takes a different approach to visual search by suiting the interface to the type of query made by the user. I only showed you a couple of Viewzi's views. In this article, I'm going to show you a number of the other views, compare results with Google, and finally discuss Viewzi's possible future.
Since Viewzi is a visual search engine, we'll resume with a visual search. My search term is “brass goggles,” and I'm going to start with the basic photo view. This view now searches Flickr and SmugMug; at the time I wrote the previous article, it searched Riya instead of SmugMug. And by the time this article is published, it might search different sites, though Flickr will probably still be in the mix. Chalk it up to Viewzi's beta status and the hunt for the combination that will give searchers the best results. Anyway, here's a screen shot of my results:
So what's awesome here? This is the view with small images. As you'd expect from Viewzi if you read my previous article, you can hover your cursor over any image you want to see a large version of it, along with its title and URL. This is the default look of the basic photo view, with small images; you can change to large images with just a click of your mouse. Even after making this change, you can hover over images to view larger versions. In other words, you can view every image in three different sizes.
The 3D Photo Cloud is a quirky view that takes a little practice to figure out. Here's a screen shot to give you a basic idea:
Those images and keywords bounce around the screen, moving, enlarging, and reducing in response to your mouse and the zoom control in the upper left corner. The directions (which disappear once you use the zoom) explain that you can click anywhere to add more search fields to refine your search, and click on terms to surface more photos. It can be a fun way to discover related keywords. Click on a photo and it enlarges tremendously, showing the title and URL underneath; click it again to return to the view of the cloud.
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