A Visual Search and Friendly Monsters

Webscape, part of BBC’s Click programme is something I look forward to everytime I see it on television. The section which is hosted by Kate Russell is all about cool websites and links on the web.  Browsing through the archives I found a couple of great sites:

The first one is a visual search engine called SearchMe which provides categories as and when you type your search string. Say you type the word Liverpool – what you get are categories like sports, business, weather, history, libraries etc. Once you select a category you are provided with relevant pages relating to the selected category. But that’s not the best part. What’s so different about this search engine is that you can actually get a full preview of all page results in the form of a slideshow-like photo album. It’s still in beta stage but I suggest you take a look yourself http://www.searchme.com

The second link which I really liked is MoshiMonster. It’s basically a game where you adopt a friendly monster and take care of it – like a virtual pet. It wasn’t the concept which impressed me – rather it was the way the website has been designed – asthetically pleasing and very user friendly. It’s a pleasure – the signing-up process is fun – take a look http://www.moshimonsters.com

Does with images what Google does with text

TinEye is an image search engine with a difference. It searches for images on the internet using not “text” but instead an “image”. So basically you need to upload an image or provide the URL of an image on the web and the TinEye search engine will return occurrences of that very image (and modified versions too) with links where they occur. There is also an option to compare the searched image with one of the results to look for variations and differences.

TinEye is still in private beta stage, so you will need to apply for permission to explore this cool concept.