Search Engine Land
- June 26, 2008
Visual Search The Future? Spare Me The Eye Candy
About two years ago, I wrote an article called
Why Search Sucks & You Won’t
Fix It The Way You Think. In it, I explained various ways people have
tried to make search "visual" and why those have largely failed. That’s
mainly because "list view" or "10 blue links" still works for lots of search
activities. But visual search has picked up some attention recently with new
players coming in. Is visual search the future, where we’ll be flying
through our results Minority Report-style? Maybe in years, but for now, I
still see a lot of eye candy and no real breakthroughs.
I looked at
Searchme,
Viewzi and
PicLens, all of which have been
reviewed recently in various places. For each, I purposely went into them without reading any of the help
information. As a result, I might be missing out on some cool features or
capabilities they have. But then again, so too are the typical people these
services hope to attract. No one is reading how to search at Google.
Even fewer than no one will read how to use these places.
