CoolIris

Cooliris is a search engine that allows you to search (both the web and your own computer) by scrolling through images. I actually use CoolIris fairly frequently and think it's a neat way to view images and browse the web. I will explore what I think are the cooler features of CoolIris, provide a number of demonstration videos, check out similar sites and explain why I think CoolIris is a worthwhile tool to implement into your Internet searching and daily web browsing.

Main Features

A brief preview of CoolIris' features is shown below (it's really really slow, for some reason I can't find a free program that will let me edit AVIs taken from my computer. )

CoolIris' format is one of the coolest features. As described on the main website, CoolIris creates a 3D wall of images that you can use enhance your search needs. You can pan past all of the results that CoolIris finds all at once (using the scroll bar at the bottom) and stop at the images that interest you. This represents a unique way of browsing the web that provides a refreshing alternative to the endless pages of texts that search engines provide by default. Clicking on each link provides you with a number of options. You can email the link to a friend, mark it as a favorite (if you're a registered member), or follow the link to the source. In addition to exploring web pages through the channels (explored in greater detail below), CoolIris also aggregates results for image search. In the search engine bar, you can choose which engine it collects the images from. By default, it is set to Google Images, but you can also choose from Bing, Flickr, and Hulu, among others. You can use whatever search syntax is recognized by the original site in your search as well, to further refine your search. Although the syntax is similar, you may have to adjust your searches depending on what website you are using to generate results. CoolIris operates similar to a metasearch in that it can search several different sites and display all the results in a similar manner.

Compatability

For now, you can only use CoolIris on supported websites, but the list is pretty extensive and owners can voluntarily list their sites with CoolIris. The built-in search engine bar provides you with a number of popular sites that you may want to use - like Youtube, Flicker, Picasa or DeviantArt.
2ur5zrm.jpg
CoolIris will even play video right on the website.

Channels

Each separate search page is referred to as a channel. As demonstrated in the video above, click on an image brings up a number of options. In the swine flu article I pulled up, a New York Times logo appears in the bottom. Clicking on it brings you to the New York Times channel, where various images from NYT are displayed, which allows you to search by source. This can be a new way to scan the news if you're not in the mood to read the headlines or flip through a newspaper. CoolIris aggregates results from the major search engines that are indexed on its site and brings them together in a visual format. Each news images brings up a small image of the article, which is useful for skimming but can be difficult if you're reading long articles due to the text size. It seems to me that CoolIris is strong on it's image search aspect, but support for text documents is lacking. Images of articles and other text documents often appear grainy and can be difficult to make out.

Computer Search

You can also direct CoolIris to a folder on your computer and it will display the images on the wall. This can be really useful if you're searching for a picture, but can't remember exactly what folder you put it in or what you named and don't feel like clicking through thousands of pictures.
14e5a1f.jpg Clicking on the picture will then take you to the folder on your computer. I prefer searching for images on CoolIris as opposed to using Windows Picture Viewer because of the simplicity. Using most picture-viewing programs, you are forced to click or tab through all the pictures that you have. CoolIris is capable of displaying all of your images in one place and significantly simplifies the search process.

Shopping

If you're in the market for a new Ipod or are looking to do some shopping in general, CoolIris can help you do that too.


This seems like one of the weaker aspects of CoolIris. This could definitely use some more development and user-friendly options. The first click on any product image will take you to a thorough product description, but again, it can be hard to read. One of my search terms returned no results, and there don't seem to be any option to what sites you would like to browse (looking for an iPod took me to Amazon.com by default.)

How it use it every day

So that all sounds really great, but how are you supposed to integrate CoolIris into your daily websurfing? The possibilities are endless but I can show you at least a few examples. If you're browsing on facebook, and get a little tired of endlessly clicking through albums to lurk pictures of your friends, CoolIris provides a solution for that.

bdpbq0.jpg

For example, on Facebook, mousing over an image will bring up the CoolIris symbol in the left bottom corner (circle in the image.) This will launch CoolIris for all the images in that album. As mentioned previously, the main appeal of CoolIris is a refreshing alternative to the countless web searches that we perform on any given day. Additionally, the website advertises that CoolIris has recently launched an iPhone app. While I haven't tested this feature (since I don't have an iPhone), I can imagine that integrating this app with the touch screen would be an interesting way to get visual search on the go. If I ever try this app on an iPhone, I will update this review.

The Competition

Bing and Google have recently launched their own versions of visual search, and while they are both novelties for these search engines giants, I think both Bing Visual Search and Google's new Fast Flip come up a little short in comparison to CoolIris. My main complaint with both of them is that I feel neither of them are truly visual search and I'll explain why.

Bing Visual Search

2lt3vb6.jpg

Bing recently introduced Visual Search, which is still in Beta mode. On the Visual Search home page, I clicked on one of the suggested search, "Movies in Theater", which brought up the image shown above. This displays movie posters from current movies, and mousing over each image will bring up the movie title, MPAA rating, metacritic rating as well as the box office ranking, if applicable. This helpful in getting an overview of all of the images, but upon clicking on any individual image, it brings you to the ordinary Bing search for that title. So in essence, Bing's Visual Search takes ordinary searches and represents each one with an images, which are then aggregated and categorized. While this can be useful, I don't think this is really "visual search" but rather a repackaging of web search. Additionally, the preset categories that are available for search don't seem to be to useful: Entertainment, Famous People, Online Media, Reference, Shopping, Sports and Travel. Although this certainly be useful in getting an overview of images for a quick websearch, I think Google Fast Flip and CoolIris offer better alternatives for an in-depth visual search experience.

Google Fast Flip

28ahjeu.jpg

As Leore recently blogged about, Google recently introduced Fast Flip as an experimental lab. The dynamic feature of Fast Flip is more an aggregation of snapshots of various new sources that you can quickly browse through. While this can be useful for collecting various standpoints from a vast array of news sources, I think it's limited in its offering for visual search. You are presented with essentially a collection of screenshots, which is really not much in terms of visual search. One feature that I think Google does well is the integration of the actual article into Fast Flip. Clicking on the image brings up the article, but doesn't require you to actually go to the origin site - it brings up a copy of the article (ad-free) that you can scroll through. Another feature that I really liked about Google Fast Flip is that you can bring up all the articles in the "section" that you are in.

2i9pde8.jpg

As shown above, you can preview all the related 'Entertainment' articles.
Google FastFlip offers a viable alternative to looking for news/articles/images, but I prefer the scrolling image wall that CoolIris presents.

Wrap Up

While I certainly have praises to sing about CoolIris, there are a number of caveats. There are a limited number of browsers that CoolIris supports. Additionally, you must download an add-on in order to use it, which limits portability a little bit. CoolIris seems to be better suited to be use in everyday browsing in your home computer (as opposed to a one-time search looking for a particular image or article.) Overall, I would definitely recommend giving CoolIris a try and seeing how it can transform the way you think about visual search.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License