It seems I am not the only one who Googles my symptoms before heading to the doctor. Google Flu Trends tracks search terms to predict when the flu will hit certain areas within the United States — an epidemic indicator, if you like. While it’s a good idea and could be extended to pseudo-prediction of epidemics and pandemics, this kind of ’searchsourcing’ will only be useful if Google remains insanely popular.
Amazon.com introduced Windowshop.com last week, their take on a virtual ‘window shopping’ experience. It lets you zoom and pan through Amazon content, like their best seller lists in music, books, video and other categories. One would guess their inspiration was the Cooliris application, but Amazon’s Windowshop seems tame in comparison. It seriously lacks the ‘wow’ factor of a slick psuedo-3D environment that Cooliris has.
With shiny, image-driven interfaces popping up everywhere, 2008 might be remembered as the year of the visual search. If visual search breaks into the big-time, Gesture based navigation might be the next big thing that may follow into the mainstream.
Nevermind the results for Cobol (which I obviously don’t really care for); it just seems like an incomplete, barely out of beta kinda search. The start page is nice and slick (which the Google chaps could really steal from) but otherwise, it’s just hype. Maybe they just wanted to be out there early so Microsoft would be enticed to buy them.
I recently discovered some neat (and not so neat) visual search interfaces
The most impressive (visually speaking) of the lot is Searchme.com — it does the iTunes coverflow thing pretty nicely and neatly in Flash. I love the tiltviewer interface but seeing my search results in that style at Bryns Brain felt a little out-of-place. RedZee has a cute mascot and the fluid circular drag motion for the search results is all done without flash, but it looks kinda sucky.
But at the end of the day, having said all that, the actual search results were truly lousy for all three visual search engines I just mentioned. I’m sticking to Google for now, thanks very much.
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