Visual search engines

For some time Google have been experimenting with new way to display search results, so are others. You can see a new trend coming up by representing results in visual form rather than listing it. You can call these "Visual Search Engines".In this entry I am going to talk about two such search engines. These two search engines have come up with interesting ideas to represent the results. These two are : Quintura and searchCrystal.

Lets start with Quintura ... Its a company that was launched with a mission to make Web search easier and faster by adding context or meaning to keywords and visualizing search. With its "See & Find" technology the results are displayed in two halves: Tag Cloud on left and list on right with links to the result pages. Keeping mouse on any entry in the tag cloud fetches more results regarding that entry. The right half also changes accordingly to display the result.

Quintura develoment team has come up with both web version (web site) and a desktop version which can be downloaded for free. Apart from this, that have provided the facility to save and share the searches.

Now on to, searchCrystal... Its a search tool that collects information from multiple search engines and displays them in cluster,spiral or list. The tool fetches results from web, image, video, blog, tagging, news engines, flickr and even RSS feeds. But the search engine is slow compared to other search tools. This is what I against my name:

Apart from being slow in displaying the data, there is no trouble from searchCrystal. You can get widgets that can be placed into your website or blog. Plus you can sign up for Analytics where the true power of the search engine lays! The tool provides a heavy tool where you can customize the search queries and see the results. You also get tog cloud, filters, sort tools etc. So this may become a serious tool for those who really want to study the trends, patterns and details of how the information is on net.

Now onto the final word.. you will see these tools come up for sure. I expect searchCrystal to improve as they have come up with a brilliant tool. Both these search engines are still in beta and Google must look into these type of data visualization in future. I have always wanted Google to provide a tag cloud of the resent search in their home page.

But for now.. I will simply watch these new tools and will as always use Google :)