24 June 2009 | Author: Yasmin Sulaiman

Spezify sets new boundaries for visual search?

Google may be the online king but it's certainly had its fair share of mishaps during the first half of 2009. From problems with its malware detector in January - when every search result was deemed harmful to a user's computer - to last month's search outage due to traffic being re-routed to a data centre in Asia, it's no wonder that Microsoft's new search offering Bing is seeing rising user uptake. Add to that the recent coverage given to new players like WolphramAlpha, Hunch and the newly re-re-branded Ask Jeeves in the UK, and it looks like Mountain View may be surrounded by potential threats.

Spezify, another newcomer to the search space, is also attempting to re-draw the medium. Its innovative interface incorporates a scrollable mosaic of text snippets, videos and images to provide a well-rounded set of search results, with content pulled through APIs from Yahoo!, eBay, MSN, Amazon and Twitter. Admittedly, not all the results will be relevant - but as a graphical representation of search results, it is arresting.

Take, for instance, this Spezify seach for "Edinburgh".



Image results from Flickr include snaps of the city's famous bagpipers, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, Edinburgh Castle and its iconic skyline. What's more, YouTube videos - many of which are of the Tattoo and events at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - can be played within the search results. Bing offers a similar feature, whereby a video thumbnail starts playing within the search results page when the mouse hovers over it; Google currently offers no such tool.

News articles, Wikipedia pages and information from Answers.com are also incorporated, as are items from Amazon and eBay. Perhaps most significantly, Spezify also incorporates Twitter posts, facilitating real-time search results that Google has, so far, stopped short of providing until it can figure out a way to filter irrelevant results. And while some of the tweets returned by Spezify aren't particularly informative, many are - and during Edinburgh's hectic summer festival season, these results could prove vital in guiding the public to the city's best events.

Speaking about the launch of the search site, which is based in Sweden, co-founder Per Persson said: "Web search has looked more or less the same since 1994. We were missing a place generating an instant and appealing overview of a certain subject, regardless of media. In addition to finding the expected, Spezify gives you new associations and lets you discover things you didn't know was out there."

Despite its visual attractiveness, it's hard to imagine Spezify taking off in a big way, at least in the short term. Like decision engine Hunch - which lets users take quizzes in order to make decisions on a range of issues, from everyday purchases to life-changing choices - there's a distinct novelty value that's sure to appeal to anyone who appreciates the colourful cheeriness of graphical illustration. In particular, its bias towards images, videos and tweets makes it useful for people heavily involved in or influenced by social media.

Ultimately, while Spezify may not be the most relevant search engine out there, it's certainly showing the industry that's it's time to think and do things differently. After all, the type of information people are searching for is changing by the week - it makes sense that the way they search for it may be changing just as fast.

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