Viewzi

A screenshot of Viewzi

Fans of visual search engines, take note: Viewzi is here, and it is fabulous!

With Viewzi, a searcher enters her keyword (s) into a plain search box and then decides in which "view" to receive the results. The different views are lined up across the top of the page and one need only click on one to see the results for that view. The different views options are:

1) Album View (searches Amazon Music Search, Last FM Album, and Last FM Related)

2) Song View (searches Amazon Mp3, Mooza Mp3, Mp3 Realm, and SeeqPod)

3) Wide Screen Shot View and 4) Power Grid View (both search Yahoo)

5) Simple Text View (searches Yahoo and Google)

6) Google Timeline View (searches Google Timeline)

7)Photo Tag Cloud View (searches Flickr)

8) 4 Sources View (Ask, Google, MSN, Yahoo)

9)Video x3 View (searches BlinkX, Veoh, and YouTube)

10) Photo View (searches Flickr and Smugmug)

11) Weather View (searches various weather sites)

12) Amazon Book View (searches Amazon)

13) Everyday Shopping View (searches Amazon, E-bay, Target, and Wal-Mart)

14) Recipe View (101 Cookbooks Recipes, 101 Cookbooks Search, Epicurious)

15) Celebrity Photo Buzz (searches CelebBuzz and Just Jared)

16) TechCrunch View (searches CrunchBase, TechCrunch, TC by date, TC Posts Info, Yahoo)

17) Celebrity Gossip (searches Just Jared, Perez Hilton Search, Pop Sugar, and TMZ Search)

18) News View ("newspaper-style layout from major news sources")

A search for the keywords "Beethoven biography" returned a YouTube clip from the
BBC's "The Genius of Beethoven"; the book Diagnosing Genius: The Life and Death of Beethoven; the Wikipedia entry on Beethoven; a clip of a performance by the Nicholls Trio; and biographical information from The Classical Archives.

Though library resources such as books and online databases are always the best option for academic research, there's no doubt that search engines are great for answering quick questions, getting an overview of a topic, etc. What I like about Viewzi is that it very definitely separates the various returns on one's search, thereby making one's returns faster and (hopefully) more what one needs.

Give it a try and see (get it, "see") what you think.
Kimberley Barker