More contest results. The second service we were introduced to at SES was a new visual search engine, with an interesting twist…
It’s called Middlespot.com and uses Yahoo! to find results. There’ve been a lot of attempts at visual search engines in the past; none of them were a huge success. Middlespot is a little different, though. Your results come up as snapshots of the actual home page of the site you’d arrive at if you clicked on a search engine result. You can scroll up and down to see the different results, and zoom in and out to get a good look at a particular page (you can actually read the page). Neat, but really nothing that hasn’t been done before. What we thought was cool about Middlespot is its “Workpad” feature. If you find a result you like, you can drag and drop the image onto your Workpad (which you can access from anywhere) or add in your own finds from other places. You could think of it as an online version of the front of your refrigerator. According to the developer, there’s unlimited space on a Workpad. We’ll just take his word for it as we didn’t test this. Some of us have enough trouble finding our keys in our house. An infinite space to fill up with pictures and clippings was a little intimidating…
Useful? A gimmick? Here’s our take. If you’re a visual person and need a way to organize the things you dig up on a particular topic, it seems that a Workpad is the idea place to store it. Couple it with the fact that Yahoo! is a pretty good search engine (It’s only beaten out by the 800 pound gorilla that is Google) and we think you’ve got a great way to conduct research or analysis projects.
Keeping tabs on your competition, pinning up their photos, writing notes about their movements…
What? Sounds a lot like stalking? No, no. In marketing, the term is “Competitive Intelligence”.
I think the female panel member took the Middlespot guy to task for using Jennifer Aniston as a search term
But, the overall idea seemed pretty cool.