Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
Displaying Search Results
In a post about the Wolfram Alpha last week I wrote about how serach engines have spent most of their efforts on finding the information rather than displaying it. Information Aesthetics had an interesting post on spezify.com. It takes visualization of search results to a whole new level. I love how it organizes posts, tweets, Wikipedia entries etc and displays them visually.
I wasn’t sure what the exact meaning was of a search result’s location on the page. I was expecting it to work like a perceptual map but I’m not sure it does. Let’s say for example I search for “Cannes”. Most of the posts I’ll get back will probably be about the Cannes film festival. These results could be displayed at the centre of the page – the capital on the map if you like. The organic search rank will determine how far away a result will be located from the city center. However, I might have a cluster of results about the tourist attractions in Cannes. They could be grouped together in another “city” on the map. A search result for a hotel that has a Cannes festival promotion could be located between the festival and tourist “cities”. A 3rd smaller “city” of search results could be about AS Cannes – the local football team. You get the idea. It feels like this could be a fairly straightforward mashup between a search engine, Flickr and Google Maps.
Spezify is still in beta and the homepage says they will soon be adding functionality such as sound and video results and more viewing modes. I’ll be keeping an eye on them.
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