From time to time new “visual” search engines emerge — the latest is “RedZee.” It offers a conventional view of search results or a visual preview of sites (Search 2.0). This visual preview feature is nothing new but the “carousel” dimension got me thinking about Apple’s Cover Flow and how it might apply to search.
The coverflow display technology was acquired by Apple and first implemented on the iPhone last year:
It was then integrated into the new Mac OS Leopard (via the Finder), with more bells and whistles:
This is a much crisper and more elegant version of what RedZee and others before it are trying to do although not on the Internet. But coverflow was developed for the Internet originally.
I was thinking this collection of visual and browsing features could represent a next-generation search display if it could be engineered to work as well online as it does in the OS or on the iPhone/iPod Touch. If one could quickly move from large preview to large preview, look at more than just the first page of a site and easily manipulate the size of the images, etc (grid view, list view, etc.) it would really be something and would represent a potentially dramatic advance over what currently exists.
There are other ideas for search hiding on the Mac desktop/OS as well.
Screenwerk 
March 11, 2008 at 12:11 pm
[…] Display Mimics iTunes ‘Coverflow’ I wrote about this idea here: I was thinking this collection of visual and browsing features could represent a next-generation […]