Is this Fancy Visual Search Useful?

Posted by Charles | October 15, 2007 .

It’s visual product search to be more accurate. I am not sure if I will use it everyday for my online purchase activities, but surely I enjoyed using it. It’s fun.

I’m talking about Oskope Visual Search, a Flash web application that bring back images as search results from Amazon, EBay, Flickr and Youtube. It’s lots more than search and showing animated images. Your experience over there can be configured. There is this slider you can adjust the images size. You can drag and drop a item into your folder. You can adjust the background color if you don’t like the dark artistic default view.

What I like it the most is the different layout view. The best is the Graph View, it spread the items according to the prices, very visual and interesting.

It’s good UI design and the great use of Flash RIA technology. However, is this a fancy Flash demo or a solid business model? Really I’m not sure. One thing I’m sure is that changing people’s behavior is hard. Site like this is aiming to redirect people’s ways of searching products. We usually, without hesitate, go directly to Amazon or EBay to find what we want. I doubt it’ll go beyond a good showcase.

Regardless, I’ll come back play once awhile, again, it’s a fun site.

oskope Is this Fancy Visual Search Useful?