Did you know that your search results need not be limited to a page full of text identifying relevant sites an links? If you are a visual person, there are other options that might better serve your needs. Pandia Search Engine News lists five of their favorites here. Their top picks include SearchMe (highlighted in the Studio here); Viewzi; EyePlorer; Ujiko; and, NeXplore. SearchMes offer pictures of sites in their results page, rather than text descriptions, with a Cover Flow-like interface. You can roll over the image to get page title and link with a short description of the site. SearchMe also allows sharing on Twitter and Facebook. Finally, you can select and store pages in a stack, which also can be shared or embedded. My personal experience with SearchMe is all positive and the visual interface offers a much faster search experience, particularly for image searches or other queries with picture-friendly results.

I don’t have personal experience with the other options and recommend you hit the jump to Pandia to get their reviews. They provide different tools and options, each being better suited to different uses. Eyespot, for example, offers a circular result with information and responsive links primarily pulled from Wikipedia. Ujiko does something similar, but pulls its results from a broader source. Nexplore and Viewzi offer different views of results, including visual images.

Although it is not itself a search engine, Cooliris has a place here. I am a big Cooliris fan. Cooliris is a Firefox add-on that takes Google Search and responds with a Cover Flow-like result. Searchme and Cooliris are phenomenal for image searching – offering a much faster way to breeze through results with a flick of the mouse or track pad.

As in the real world, the right tool for the right job. These search engines offer different functionality with different strengths. Don’t limit yourself to that Google box: try out some of these other options and make your search results take you where you want to go
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