right-brained search engines

I'll admit - I'm as left-brained as they come. Give me information in plain text, displayed in a nice linear format, and I'm happy. Search engines that display their results in a more visual format get me twitching.

That said, I've started to appreciate some of these visual search results. One of the latest ones to have emerged is Middlespot.com. The search results page has a narrow column on the left that has the list of hits, just like any other search engine. But the bulk of the page shows thumbnails of the retrieved pages, which makes it easy to skim over and make some snap judgments on the usefulness of the page based on its appearance. What's unusual about Middlespot is that it displays these thumbnails as images, and lets you copy these images to a "Workpad" you can share with others. Given that I do a lot of public speaking, and often have to create a bunch of screen shots of the sources I discuss, this is a really quick way of generating screen shots with a single mouse click.

Some of the other visually-oriented search engines that I've looked at include
Searchme, Snap Search and, to a certain extent, Exalead.

Comments

[Searchme]

Thanks for posting about Searchme – we really appreciate it! We wanted to let you know that we’ve just added this cool new feature called Stacks, which lets you collect groups of your favorite web pages and then share them via email, web sites, Facebook®, MySpace®, and blogs like yours. We’ve also added Searchme Media Search, which lets you search for images or videos from Flickr™ and YouTube™.

Check out our Demo Videos:
http://www.searchme.com/press/press_videos.php

Or check out Stacks in action:
http://www.searchme.com/stacks/

Thanks!

The Searchme Team