Among the many announcements Apple made at the keynote of its World Wide Developer Conference yesterday was a new version of its Safari web browser. The update includes the ability to search your browsing history via Coverflow.
Coverflow, if you’re not familiar, is something Apple’s been using for years on iTunes and iPod/iPhone. It displays images and you scroll (or swipe if you have a touch screen) left to right to browse. With music, it displays album covers and you select the one you want.
We’ve seen visual search engines launch to implement something similar into search. Searchme and Viewzi are two great examples.
Of course, this update in the Safari browser is different in that it only searches your web history. We haven’t seen a lot from Apple in the way of search. But with Google going after enterprise and software (though mostly through the cloud) and Microsoft going after search, Apple may feel the need one day to do so.