Search for Beatiful Dynamic Visual Lifestream Pages with Spezify

Today I discovered a new and very different search engine. Spezify is a new search tool which presents its results using beautiful visual boxes from content it discovers based on search engine results and rich media sites like Flickr, YouTube where it scours to get imagery and even finds ways to present textual content in a pretty fashion. If I had to provide a quick description that many of you would understand it would be if Google married SweetCron and this was their spawn.

Just like any new search tool the first thing you are mandated to do is a vanity search. So when I searched for my name I quickly realized that the results could easily pass as a Lifestream for me. The results included recent Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Tweets, profile descriptions and more. Now I know this may not be the case for everyone, especially depending on how common your name and its associated results may be, however I found it to be very cool in my case and think it’s worthy of trying for yourself as well.

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Beyond being able to use it as a Lifestreaming search engine, you can create really nice visual / informational pages on any topic or entity. Below are several examples to demonstrate this including The Smiths, X PRIZE Foundation (my employer), and Hamburger (my other true love).

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After you receive the results page you can click and hold your mouse to scroll up and down as well as left and right to reveal more results dynamically as you scroll. This got me thinking that if these guys partnered up with the folks at Cooliris to provide a 3D visual interface that I might never leave my house. You also have an options page where you can choose whether to include results from various search engines and web services, filter results to include images, video, text, or all of them, or provide “safe” search results. Lastly they also generated related key words based on your search which you can then click on to view their results.
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(options page)

Here’s a snip from the Spezify site with their description of the service:

We take web search further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience. We want you to get a good overview of a subject, find useful information and be inspired with Spezify. We collect websites and are aiming to use as many relevant, free and open API:s as possible to generate extensive and diverse search results.

Spezify also reminded me of another nice visual search engine called Viewzi that you should also check out. When I went there tonight to take a look they seemed to have added quite a few more features and have progressed quite nicely since the last time I visited the site.

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(my Viewzi results)

We are a visual culture and the nice mix of images, video, and text is a new interface paradigm that is becoming more and more common and seems to really be striking a chord with web  users. I really look forward to watching Spezify evolve and include a larger group of services in their results as they plug into more API’s in the future.

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8 thoughts on “Search for Beatiful Dynamic Visual Lifestream Pages with Spezify”

  1. Great post Mark. The search engine has a good algorithm for how it mixes up results… makes for nice collages like you said.

    On a more practical note, it would be good if it had a “most recent” view so that you could get timely results on a topic.

  2. Hey Austin. I totally agree that being able to filter the search results by a timeframe to get recent results would further improve using it as a Lifestream generator.

  3. I was surprised at the speed in which the site ran. Vewzi is great, but it is often a bit slow to search. Spezify brought results to the front page almost immediately.

    I would be a little concerned about making it a lifestream generator both for the time based problem, as well as some wonky results it provides. Searching “traeblain” brings up a couple crazy results, that have nothing to do with me. (Incidently dropping of MSN search from the list cleared 80% of it up.)

  4. Pingback: Spezify, un buscador visual » hombrelobo, una mente dispersa

  5. i agree about needing to sort chronologically… or in other ways: color, duration, relevance?

    viewzi's filtering options seem quite interesting, reminds me i need to be tagging my photos better…

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