Visual Search - The Future of Search?

NetOperator Wibby

Has anyone heard of Spezify yet? It's like Google, only with more type of media on one page [Google separates docs/links and images]. Check it out, here's a search I did for "Rokkuman" :

http://spezify.com/#/rokkuman

Data is loaded via flash and aggregated from a number of other search engines [and it shows you related words at the top].

Now, I'm still not sure if such a method for searching is practical, or even useful for most searches but if you like to discover new things related to things you already like, this may be the [new!] type of search engine for you.
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Tachyon360 · Le Croissant Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 740

Whoa-boy. This is going to be harsh. Bear with me.

Spezify is all glitz and no substance. Let's ignore that it uses Flash instead of AJAX and consider that it doesn't present data in any meaningful way. If we're to look at this UI as a metaphor for a real-world item, it amounts to nothing more than the cluttered desk of an utter slob. There's a reason that lists and indexes have survived so long and so well. Innovation is bound to come in the form of lists and indexes relevant to the context of your search, not a pile of images that the Internet decided to vomit up onto your screen.

This isn't even a good way to putz around and discover new content. There's no apparent method at play here - just a lot of madness. Effective discovery searches have some pretty sophisticated statistical algorithms to present content to you, and often have comprehensive maps of content relatedness. Look at Last.FM and iTunes Genius, for example. Though I can only speak from my own experience, those two services led me to discover artists who's music I subsequently purchased far more often than if I just blindly went looking for new music. That's not to say visual representations of data aren't valid, though. Zune 3.0 had a really good idea with its music discovery service.

What it all comes down to is context. None whatsoever is apparent in Spezify, and that's what makes it bad.
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Dark Roll · Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2009 8:52 pm Post subject:

i like the idea, but it looks like a headache, no offence. but the way they have the searches scattered would be a cool looking profile layout for some website.
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Poochy.EXE · Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:33 pm Post subject:

The trouble with the format is, when you're trying to search for something, you don't want to be covering the same ground multiple times, as you'd be wasting your time with repeats.

For example, say you're looking for a single quote in a book, but you have no idea where it is. It would probably be much more efficient to just start at the beginning and skim through until you find the quote, as opposed to opening to a random page, looking for the quote on the page, and opening to another random page if it's not there. The reason here is that with the latter method, chances are you'll start opening to random pages that you've already looked through, which becomes a waste of time.

The way Spezify is organized (if you could even call that organization) has no order whatsoever to it, which basically forces you into the equivalent of the "open to a random page" search method. Even if you're looking for stuff related to what you like, there are already far more efficient algorithms out there that don't just dump all the results haphazardly in front of you.

The future of search is probably in ways to weed out irrelevant results and find relevant results that may not have the exact wording you used in the search. There's a reason why Netflix put up $1,000,000 for the first person or team to devise an algorithm 10% better than the one they were using before. (Don't bother looking to win it - a team already won the million.) And Hollywood-style extremely graphical viewer-friendly interfaces are highly impractical in real life.
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NetOperator Wibby · Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2009 10:46 pm Post subject:

I suppose those are valid points 360. Still, I do find the site interesting and I found some episodes of Ryuusei that I haven't seen [like the one where he gets the full Tribe outfit ... I don't really follow it, lol]. I was just curious to see if anyone would even find a use for this. Random research?

Dark Roll · Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2009 9:34 am Post subject:

i agree, like i said it is a cool idea, but it is not going to work very well. the site is way to cluttered.
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" ♥ ♪ you think you know his battle chips, ♪
♪ but i got news for you. ♪
♪ hes got a whole new battle style, ♪
♪ your old tricks just wont do! ♪ ♥ "