October 8, 2009

Eye Tracking Without The Eyes - AttentionWizard.com Beta

Eye tracking studies can be a very valuable tool that can help identify significant problems with your website or landing page. Unfortunately eye tracking requires expensive and specialized hardware and software to be used, and live test subjects to observe and measure.

In-page Web analytics can also provide detailed heatmaps of people's clicking and scrolling behavior. But these also require the landing page to be properly tagged and measure the behavior of real site visitors. This data takes time to collect and can only be gathered from "live" pages.

Recent advances in the study of computational attention and human visual processing now offer a new and exciting alternative. Computer algorithms can be used to simulate where people will look during the first few seconds of interacting with your site and create a detailed attention heatmap of your landing page.

This approach has several advantages:

Instant results - upload an image of the landing page and get your answer
High degree of accuracy - 75%+ correlation with eye tracking and mouse tracking
Works with page mock-ups - can be used with in-progress mock-ups before the page goes live

SiteTuners.com has recently announced the launch of a FREE private beta program (limited to the first 5000 sign-ups) for it new AttentionWizard.com visual attention simulation tool. Free daily heatmaps will be available for all participants for the length of the beta program. A paid version with per-image based pricing is expected by Q1 2010 for individuals, companies, and interactive agencies.

Posted by Tim Ash at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

June 26, 2008

Searchme Adds Media Search and Visual Bookmarking

Visual search engine Searchme has announced the addition of two new features. The first is Media Search, which allows users to search for videos and images from YouTube and Flickr. The second is "Stacks," a visual bookmarking and sharing features that enables users to share what they find on blogs, social media profiles, email and web sites.

"These visual search applications enhance our core search engine by allowing people to use Searchme in fresh, innovative ways across various media and all over the Web," said Randy Adams, Searchme CEO. "It's another step in our long-term plan to add features and functionality, improve our beta engine's relevance and coverage, and create a world-class search experience."

"Until now, most web users have had to check multiple bookmarks every day, click on dozens of links pasted into an email, and hunt multiple times for sites they saw once but didn't have time to check out," said Adams. "With Stacks, they can now bypass these methods, saving time and creating an organized web experience."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 16, 2008

Coolest 3D Search Engine Ever? Ergo Social Media Search

Sure, Google and Yahoo were in Vegas. The keynote takeaway: Bill Gates. Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, he likely won't be back.

MSN and Yahoo keynotes launched mobile search platforms—operating systems like Windows Mobile and platforms like Yahoo! Go—that promise to be the new Mini-me of search in 2008.

Mike Boland of The Kelsey Group will tell you why CES 2008 changed the Local Search game forever. Next week, in SEW Experts. The promise of true mobile search is the ability to find things when you need them: the closest restaurant, driving directions, phone numbers.

Google Android? Not exactly iRobot yet. Or iSoftware for that matter.

CEO of RankAbove, Eli Feldblum, said the show did showcase some cool new technologies for the search marketing world.

Eli: "The newest products from Microsoft and Yahoo! seem to deliver these things, along with some other cool features, like the ability (which I use all the time) to take photos with my phone and upload them to Flickr with Yahoo! Go or edit full Office docs from my phone with Windows Mobile.

One thing that CES really brought into the forefront was cool, new search technology platforms, offering amazing, 3D visualized search using multiple sources.

Ergo, from document management company, InVu, combines desktop search with web and photo search, and organizes the results in a number of intuitive, visually-stunning displays. It also offers the ability to annotate and share results. Currrently in beta for Windows Vista users."

Cogito, ergo sum. Add it to your list of cool search engines.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 5:43 PM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

Like.com Offers Visual Fashion Search

Image search company Riya has applied its matching technology to a new fashion shopping site called Like. The idea is that you if you find a fashion item you like -- a particular handbag, pair of shoes, watch or jewelry -- the search engine will find related products by examining the actual image. You can keyword search, browse products or browse items worn by celebrities to get matches.

I love watches, so I gave it a spin. In particular, I have a large collection of Swatches. So, I started off to see what swatches would bring back. I got plenty of matches, and a "Hawaii" swatch on the first page caught my eye.

Clicking on it brought up a new page, allowing me to pick what I liked the most about it in degrees using sliders, for these criteria:

Color
Shape
Pattern

It was the pattern more than anything else, so I kicked that slider up. The results changed, bringing up mainly heart monitoring watches first. Not what I wanted!

Next I tried browse mode. I was able to drill into the analog round matches, but none of these were to my fancy.

Now it was time for what's clearly the hype factor -- search for something that a celebrity is wearing. The gallery has only two men, and while I have little in common with either Diddy or Brad Pitt, I went the Brad route. One shot of him was when he was wearing a watch, so I clicked on that.

A page came up with watches similar to what he had. Was this image matching magic? Preset examples always make me wary -- they typically have been refined and fine-tuned. Even if not, I don't know that I need image matching technology to easily find watches like he was wearing. Here -- see accessories like those worn by Cameron Diaz, no image search required.

The real test will be when, as Somewhat Frank says, you'll be able to upload images of your own and do searches. Or, you can play with searches of the many existing images and see how it goes. I wasn't blown away by it, but I only did the few queries above. Another product, another search, perhaps it would be great. It's certainly worth trying and keeping in mind.

Riya's Like.com Is First True Visual Image Search at TechCrunch talks about the background, the idea that Riya is a leading company trying to match images based on images, rather than words. Riya's received lots of attention over the past year for its technology, but it's notable that so far, the company doesn't seem to have had much financial success. This type of matching is the third direction it has now gone in.

First, Riya seemed targeted to help you upload photos of people and do face recognition to find others. Then Google was rumored to be interested, though that never went through. Google later acquired another image recognition company, Neven Vision.

Riya shifted to being a web image search service, which remains running at Riya.com. The current focus on fashion products is tied to where Riya says users were most interested. ZDNet has more on this. You can also check out CEO Munjal Shah's blog for background.

Need another review? The Wall Street Journal takes a look for paid subscribers in Where to Find a Famous Look and seems mostly happy.

Like the idea? Here are some reports of shopping search engines with matching features you might like:

Postscript: Pixsta tips me off to Chez Imelda, where they power visual shoe search. Gary Price also has a list of other visual search services here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:41 AM | Permalink

November 3, 2006

See And Find With Quintura

Quintura is the latest in the line of visual search engines such as Kartoo, Mooter and WebBrain. Quintura basically takes your search term, runs a search and then translates the results into a tag cloud effect on the screen. Users can then simply look at the results (powered by Yahoo) listed under the tag cloud and click on the link as per normal, or they can explore words displayed in the semantic map to focus the query more closely.

The results section of the page is not exciting - title, URL, keywords in context and sometimes the size of the page, but that's about it. I'd like to have seen more information, and keywords in context are no more than a word either side, which doesn't provide any guidance at all. This section of the page is also squeezed into the bottom half of the screen, giving it a cramped feeling. This is probably the weakest element of the search engine, and clearly the one that the developers spent least time on because they wanted to get onto the interesting and fun section of the semantic display.

This is where Quintura does become more interesting and quite fun to play with. After the search runs the search terms appear on the screen and are surrounded with other hopefully appropriate terms. My search on 'search engine watch' for example returned keyword suggestions such as 'blog', 'forum', 'search engines' and so on. The closer to the search terms, the larger the keyword suggestions (both in terms of font size and bold), the more relevant they are deemed. Holding the mouse over a term - note that you don't need to click - will display a new set of results in the bottom window and will also show another keyword cloud overlaying the original, which does get a little confusing at times, and it's quite hard to work out exactly what you're searching on.

However, it's an interesting approach to search, and users who enjoy different approaches to the display of search results will enjoy using it.

It does obviously have more flexibility though, as it's a reasonably well rounded search engine. Keywords can be dropped from the semantic display by clicking on the appropriate icon, and any associated keywords are also dropped at the same time. Excluding 'baseball' from the search on my name also excluded 'statistics' for example. Words can be added to a search by simply clicking into a blank area in the screen and typing them into the search box that appears; words can be excluded in a similar manner as well with the usual minus sign in front. It's possible to save searches as a favorite or it can be emailed to a friend or colleague.

There are additional things that I'd like to see with Quintura; a more indepth 'help' guide, RSS feeds, greater search functionality by type - at the moment it's limited to web or images, and news, blogs and so on would be a nice addition. Equally however it's in beta mode, so it would be unfair to be overly critical.

As previously mentioned, people who enjoy visual search results pages will get a kick out of this one, while for everyone else it's a bit of an oddity they'll ignore. While the semantic element is clearly the emphasis I personally found the cramped results section too irritating to want to use this engine for any length of time.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 5:39 AM | Permalink

October 31, 2006

Smarter Launches Visual Search

Seems that just last week I mentioned a shopping comparison engine launching a color search feature. Well, this week it's Smarter's turn to take the colorful spotlight.

Smarter.com today launched visual search. Visual search can be found by clicking on the Clothing & Accessories tab or by searching for any product within that section. Right now it's is a bit hidden as the consumer has to click on a small link under the header.

Differentiator here is that Smarter's visual search is all about clothing. Users select gender, then a top (shirt, sweater, etc.), then a bottom (pants, shorts, etc.), then choose the color for each. Smarter then returns two bands of products (the top on top, the bottom on the bottom) so users can see what the shirt and shorts might look like together.

More information (with colorful screenshots) on ComparisonEngines or try out Visual Search now.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:07 PM | Permalink

September 20, 2006

The Unchanging Search Interface

Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think from me on my personal blog Daggle covers a session I did at Euro Foo Camp this week. It looks at how the search interface of major search engines has largely stayed unchanged over time. We're still using what I call the "DOS of Search." Interestingly, the Google Base change that just happened is a unique event -- the first major search engine to have an important property without that all-important search box on the home page. For me, it's just another sign of how Google Base is not intended to be a consumer-facing product, as I've written before.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:22 AM | Permalink

June 23, 2005

May 9, 2005

New: Visualize Yahoo Results with Grokker

One information visualization tool that's received plenty of attention over the past few years is Groxis from Grokker.

Today, the NY Times reports that you can now use Groxis to visualize Yahoo Search results for free and WITHOUT having to download the Groxis client. If anyone is interested in checking out this new and easily accessible service, it's me. It's been a year or so since I used Groxis and at that point it was interesting but didn't seem to add much value to my searching. I think it's time to give it another look.

Until now the company has sold a $49 program for use with Windows-based and Macintosh computers. Beginning this week, the company will rely instead on revenue from advertisements placed by the Yahoo ad placement service.

The Groxis relationship with Yahoo is not exclusive, but Mr. Pittman [Groxis CEO] said Yahoo had been quicker than its competitor, Google, in creating a standard way to place relevant ads next to Grokker's circular search result maps.

To access Grokker's new web version, go here.

The full Grokker client software remains available for $49. Site-licensed versions for the enterprise and education communities remain available.

More about Groxis in: + Groxis moves up in the world (via SiliconValley.com + Groxis Launches Grokker E.D.U. for the Education Market (via Info Today) + Groxis Ships Version 2 of Its Visual Search Tool (via Info Today)

Of course, Groxis isn't the only info visualization tool out there. Here are some other resources to try:

+ NewsisFree offers News Map's for seven news categories.

+ Amazon, Google, and LiveJournal visualization tools from TouchGraph

+ SmartMoney's Map of the Market A very cool and useful way of looking at stock market data. Access to some maps is free while others are fee-based.

+ Google News Map (Note: Osinga works for Google's engineering team, and this is part of his blog)

+ Client software: Personal Brain

+ Hoover's via anacubis Visualize some of the business data that Hoover's makes available for free.

You can also use anacubis to visualize Amazon and Google.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:24 AM | Permalink

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