RedZee visual search is fancier, less useful than text

There's a fancy new search engine in town: RedZee. It has a cute animated mascot and it presents search results in a cute new way: Using a "visual fan," that reminds me very much of Apple's Cover Flow.

Cover Flow is great. For covers. But as a search interface, unfortunately, the eye candy doesn't work. While it is very nice to be able to see your search results as visual images, you can't really judge the quality of a result from a thumbnail screen preview. Text is what tells you what the good results are.

RedZee does give you text excerpts, just like Google and every other olde-tyme engine. But you can only see one text blurb at a time. You have to "flow" the visuals to see others. That makes quick textual comparison of results impossible.

If you want to see Web previews in your search results, try the GooglePreview extension for Firefox.

I can't fault RedZee's search results (Webware is the #1 hit for "Web 2.0"), but the interface is too cute to be useful.

[listen_to_webware]

ask.com used to have this feature 3 years back. They even advertised it on television. They used to give a preview of the ssearch results in a balloon when you hovered the mouse over it.

http://blogbard.com/blodio/blogmainpage?type=blogbard&playurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webware.com%2F8300-1_109-2-0.xml

[zomg300]

Actually they still do.

[dominiccampbell]

Couldn't agree more. Looks fancy but is utterly useless to me. Gave it one go, played with it for 5 minutes then gave up. Shame but the lesson's there to learn from others who have taken this path.

[oludir]

Blocks basic searches like "beautiful"
I wanted to test it and the first word that came to my mind was "beautiful". The site refused to show the result and would not even sensor inadequate material.

[louciano9]

I think the product as it stands today is pretty powerfull especially since it uses only client side java script to pull the images. I also like the way it keeps the results in a clickable button on the top left and just adds more while you go through the results. Once the search gets more well rounded(just not erroring out on certain phrases) and maybe adds alil more text from pages somewhere i think it will be a very usefull tool.

[ds5929]

Just gave it a try. Words fail me. What is beyond 'useless'? A complete and total waste of time and bandwidth.