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June 27, 2007
Search Crystal: search among documents and formats
The blog needed an update after more than 40 days and so its time to introduce you a new service.
Search Crystal is a free Flash based web application that shows some nice tools, to filter and organize search results from: web, images, videos, news, blogs, tags, mash-ups. It aims to offer a comprehensive interactive overview among several sources of different formats.
The software displays information using the focus context techinque and using the Target metaphore. This its really interesing also because the same approach have been used in a prototype ( published in a conference paper in early 2002 ) for the DesignNet project with which share one same issue: the display and the aggreagtion of contents of different formats.
Even the use of some feature ( like the spiral, the rotation of results, the zooming, etc... ) offers some interesting possibilities, in terms of User Experience I think that the software needs of a deeper work and some more efforts to reduce the distance among its functions and users expectations.
One good point, even if not so original, is the ability to include Search Crystal in your own web site, simply adding a piece of code.
As usuall, you can have a look to some screenshots collected from the application.
Give it a try 
http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/06/27/search-crystal-search-among-documents-and-formats/
Posted by InfoVis at June 27, 2007 7:59 AM
