Visual Browsing

No sooner had I published my previous post on browser trends than I see the BBC reporting on both Google's new Fast Flips approach to browsing the Internet, as well as an article on the Bing search-engines 'visual' search capabilities.

Both of these approaches provide a visual representation of articles, with Fast Flips also categorising the content for easy navigation - this is not dissimilar to the innovative approach seen with the Cuil search-engine which aims to provide a 'magazine-style' presentation of results, complete with thumbnail images. Indeed the whole 'magazine-layout' approach to presenting content appears to be becoming increasingly popular.

An important quotes from one of the BBC articles is ...consumers can process results with images 20% faster than text only results. This could explain one of the underlying factors driving browsing habits toward increasingly visual representations - it also ties in with the whole Web 2.0 concepts of both data-aggregation and rich user-interfaces.

At the time of writing the Bing visual interface appears to be unavailable, so I cannot comment on specifics, other than to say that the approach sounds both interesting and exciting.

Google's Fast Flick service was operating, but currently appears to offer no obvious customisation options that allow registered users to tailor the content and/or layout (please post a comment if you are aware how to do this).

Consequently the content appears to be biased towards US interests at present. However, when you login a message appears stating that Fast Flip may use your email address to personalise your experience on their website, so presumably you need to start using the service in order for it to start making recommendations etc.

Having said that, this is still classed as a laboratory project so I'm sure these features will improve over time.