Viewzi: Beautiful Search
Written on May 9, 2008 – 12:45 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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Viewzi is a new player in the search engine world. They launched in closed beta at the end of april and have distributed about 50,000 invites so far. Fighting Google just on strength is virtually impossible. So, as most self appointed ‘Google Killers’ Viewzi focuses on displaying their search results more intelligently. First they try to guess what kind of information you are looking for. Is is a term, an image, a person or maybe audio of video content. Then they get a bunch of results from other specialized search engines like Google but also Flickr and Amazon.
Once they have gotten these results they present them in a ‘View’ that is optimized for the kind of content you are looking for. You can easily switch between different ‘Views’ and websites and images are previewed and preloaded so you don’t have to go back and forth between sites trying to find out which result is the right one.
I was skeptical when I looked at their front page. It just looked too black, image rich and bloated. But I decided to check out their video and than made all the difference. The implementation of what they call ‘Views’ is very well done and the idea of browsing through filtered content in their result pages actually sounds cool.
Google, and most other websites, aim to make the search experience as efficient as possible. You search, get results and click away to a destination site somewhere off the Google domain. Viewzi attempts to make the Search experience more than that. If they manage to deliver you will stick around browsing content on their site similar to how you browse through music in iTunes. browsing through beautiful results could be an joyful experience instead of a waste of time.
UPDATE: I have asked for few invitations. If you want one leave a comment and I will send you
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