Yesterday I received my invitation to the beta of the new search Viewzi - and I must say that I had really a lot of fun playing around with it so far. But what is Viewzi?

Viewzi is a highly visual and very different way to search the web. Rather than throw millions of results at you in a big list, each search delivers a list of “views” - each containing a different mix of presentation and results.

Everybody who knows me as an information architect, knows that I love simplicity on websites and that something like Viewzi, is something I have been waiting for. Let me show you, what I have experienced so far.

How does it work?

In the end you do nothing else, than everytime: you search for a term and get results. But what Viewzi does is not to offer you an boring list like Google or Yahoo, but Viewzi offers you different views for different kind of searches.

These views not only have different interfaces, but also different kind of sources. What is quite interesting, that they plan to offer you the possibility to also create your own views, with your own sources and that there will also be a revenue share model for that.

I have tested a few different views for you with the search term: “Second Life” (sorry - couldn’t resist)

Screenshot View

In the screenshot view, you see quite a big preview of the website, plus the headline, description and URL of a site. It’s a kind of coverflow for website’s

To be honest this is not one of my favorited views, but I am a highly visual thinking person and sometimes I try to recover a website, which I have visited before and of which I can remember how it looked liked. For this case the screenshot view can be really helpful.

But if I have to find a totally new site, I think the screenshot view doesn’t help me a lot, because the picture - on which I am focused on - just doesn’t tell me if the site has the info’s I am looking for.

Photo and Video View

Two other views - which I really like - are the Videox3 and the Basic Photo search. The video search uses Youtube, BlinkX and Veoh as sources - the photo search uses flickr and riya. It’s simple, shows you only what you are looking for and let you nicely browse through the results.

If you don’t care about any meta information and if you have an idea of what you are looking for, I guess this view can really help you to search much quicker. Especially the video search can show you much more results at first sight, than every video site I know of.

Everyday Shopping and Amazon Book View

One of my favorite views is the “Everyday Shopping” view. As sources you can chose between Amazon, Ebay, Target and Walmart and then you get a very clear view on the products you are searching for. For me this view is really handy and covers exactly the way I would prefer to search for products.

Especially the Amazon Book View let you really forget that you are on a website and gives you much more the feeling, that you have a book in your hand and look at it, like in a real store. This might sound strange, but this really to the basics reduced view, which isn’t “overchareged” with teasers, advertising, related links and other stuff, gives you a nice relaxing browsing experience like in a real book store … just the coffee shop is missing

Is this a search for day to day business?

So these are just a few views, I have showed you so far. There will be 21 different fews at launch. The question of course is: will I really use this search in my day to day business or is it just nice to play around with?

I would say, that it really depends on the situation. If I am in the mood to just browse around a bit and if I just want to get a few inspirations and if I don’t exactly know what I am really looking for, I would enjoy it much more to search with Viewzi, than with Google or for example to search directly on Ebay or Amazon.

If I exactly know what I am looking for and if I need meta informations or special more complicated search requests, I would still use the boring list based searches and/or would visited directly the special websites to get my informations.

But in a few cases - as for example mentioned regarding the screenshot view - I see also really an advantages in using a Viewzi view, instead of a list based search.

What I really hope to see, is that Viewzi maybe influences a few more website owners, web designers and information architects to make them think about more enjoyable, relaxing and simplified searches, instead of just implementing the Google Search Appliance.

Well - I think Viewzi is a great project and I could really imagine to use a few of the views on a more regular basis, depending on what I am looking for. Btw: If you want to test Viewzi by yourself: I can’t invite you, but I got my invite after signing up for it pretty quickly. So have fun testing it and let me know what you think.