Visual Search: A Better Way to Find Information?

Visual search is an area that's definitely gaining traction. A couple interesting startups have emerged that put a new twist on searching for information:

• SearchMe, located in Mountain View, CA, a well founded startup, launched its private beta in March 2008
• Viewzi, based in Dallas, TX, is offering early access to its visual views

SearchMe takes the Cover Flow approach to visually represent search results. Their model is very similar to Finder in Apple's Mac OS X.


Though very attractive, the SearchMe model is limited when searching for songs, videos, or shopping items. SearchMe always return a web page which may not always be the most appropriate context.

Here comes Viewzi, which created a platform with an API to allow domain experts to build specialized views. As it matures Viewzi is planning to open up its platform to allow the community to contribute views and expertise. Viewzi already provides multiple ways for users to search for information and users can switch between different views based on the type of search that they perform. Some interesting samples from the various view Viewzi provides:

• Video x3 View
  
• 4 Sources View
  
• Web Screenshot View
  
• Gadget View
  
• Everyday Shopping View
  
• MP3 Search View
  
• Album View
  

Viewzi also does a pretty good job at associating the relevant views to the search term.
Such focused visual searches are very effective to help locate information more quickly as they clearly set the context for the user. The application of such technologies within the enterprise would be tremendous. It will be interesting to follow Viewzi's evolution as they open up their platform to a broader community and how many business related views emerge.

Data Sharing and Vizualization: Next Generation

The International Weekly Journal of Science has published an interesting article illustrating how social software us creating a new paradigm for sharing data. Proof in point is IBM's new Many Eyes service launched on January 23rd. The site provides an infrastructure for uploading data sets and creating visualization for the data through various visualization types available.
By making the data publicly available and providing an infrastructure to analyze it, it empowers individuals and creates a very powerful model for developing collective intelligence quickly. Fernanda Viégas of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts points out that governments, international agencies and research organizations generate huge silos of publicly available data on almost every aspect of society, but the public has never been able to explore, share and discuss these data sets easily. That is interesting, but more interestingly, I could see huge applications of this type of technology to the enterprise with potential dynamic enterprise datasets. In the enterprise context, this type of application of social software could drastically impact organizations' ability to be more data driven and to leverage data to collaborate on business decisions.

Below, some more screenshots from Many Eyes.

Posted visualizations:

Posted comments:

Posted data sets:

Agora: A Community Network Visualizer

Wish you could get a better understanding of the dynamics of virtual communities? Who are the key members of the community, how do community members interact with each other? Well, here comes Agora... Stefano Mazzocchi sent an email to the Apache community demonstrating Agora and its usefulness in analyzing online communities. I must say, it is very nice. 3 years of data collected to give you an in-depth view of various communities' interaction. Here is an example of the Jetspeed development community from January 2003 to July 2005. I was curious to see how much I had contributed to the community so I decided to highlight my own name...



if you want to try the tools for yourself, go to the demo posted by Stephano. Or check the latest version of the application from MIT on their Welkin project home page.