Symmetri has launched SearchCube a new visual search engine powered by Google. True to its name this search engine allows users to browse through search results inside a hollow 3D cube. This is basically a mash up application that pulls the search results from Google and creates a hollow 3D cube with the thumbnails. This single cube can show up to 96 results pulled not just from web but also from image and video search results of Google.
The thumbnails are arranged in the walls of the cube and the cube can be rotated or flipped with the mouse or using keyboard. Also on mouse over on any of the thumbnails the details of the results are displayed on the right side of the screen. The users can access any results by clicking on them.
While this is a nice small application to play around with, I don't see much value in it from the regular user's perspective. Two main drawbacks of SearchCube that is very apparent are..
- The thumbnails are of very low quality
- The results are displayed not in sequence as they appear in Google and as it pulls results from web, image and video search results there is no way for users to determine the relevancy of results in one shot.
In spite of the drawbacks this is a big step ahead. With the increasing number of visual search engines that are launched every other day ( some of them gaining popularity as well) and the traditional search engines strengthening there image search application it is probably worth a thought if visual search is going to be the next big thing.
Tags: innovation, Mashups, Search Cube, Visual search engine