Viewzi takes your search terms, tries to figure out what you’re looking for and get the most relevant results. Sounds like every search engine, right? Viewzi’s twist is in the variety of different “views” within the search results and the highly visual presentation. The results are grouped into categories or “views” like shopping, weather, photos, videos, web pages, mp3’s, etc. And then presented in a snazzy flash based visual format.
A search for DDR mats brought back the Shopping view as the first view. The view made it easy to browse results from Amazon, ebay, Target and WalMart. The Recipe view accurately returned no results, while the Weather view revealed that it was 81 and sunny in Defiance, MO. Oh well, if I were really looking for DDR Mats, I wouldn’t have bothered to look at the Weather view.
Relevant results for the search using css to format lists were presented in the 4 Sources, Simple Text and Web Screenshot views. 4 Sources is a meta search of Yahoo, Google, Ask and MSN. Simple Text returms results from Yahoo and Google and displays them in a text list with a page preview image thrown in for extra measure. Screenshot view is an easy to navigate carousel or slide show of web pages.
Search for a song, get a list of mp3’s with a buit in player. Other views make it easy to browse photos and videos in some interesting ways. Though there seem to be some glitches with an error message in the Basic Photo View saying there are no results, then showing the results. In the 3D Photo Cloud view I found myself chasing photos all over the screen and getting frustrated trying to view them. Maybe I’m just not understanding that view. I think I’ll be totally hooked on the Recipe view though. Results from 4 cooking sites with big photos of the recipes. That’s the way I like to browse for food!
More ‘views’ are in development as is an API to allow users to create their own custom views.
Tech Crunch has more information, as does the Viewzi Corporate page. Now I really want a bigger monitor to see all this visual goodness more clearly.
