Just when you thought no one could possibly launch yet another search engine along comes Viewzi. Viewzi, like several other new search engines, is actually a meta-search engine aggregating the results of searches from a number of primary search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and other resources. However, Viewzi doesn't just present a big list of search results, it categorizes them. Where Viewzi is unique is its presentation technique called "views."

Viewzi’s views are both a visual technique and a categorization method. The aggregated results of every search are parsed for specific data such as links to images, dates, or content type and then shown according to that selection criteria – this is what constitutes a view.

Viewzi has worked with a number of designers to create lots of different views such as a simple text view, site information, screenshots of Web pages, a news view, a 3D cloud of photos (one of my favorites), a comparative display of results from Yahoo, Google, Ask, and MSN, a music album cover display, a shopping view, MP3 search … it’s quite a list. A particular favorite of mine is the weather view.

One of Viewzi’s most recently added views is a timeline which shows the results according timestamps on retrieved pages.

Viewzi works with the Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer (Version 7 is recommended), Safari, and Opera browsers and requires at least Flash Version 9 and uses the crossdomain.xml (a browser policy file that enables direct cross-domain data loading - click here to see).

The service is still in beta, and registering and logging in allows the service to remember any view customization you use. At the time of this writing the service doesn’t add much value. For example, I’d like to see the ability to customize a default search for views such as the weather page but there’s nothing like this at present.

My only complaint about Viewzi is that I’d like to see an easier way of selecting which view you want to use – at present you have to mouse over a line of thumbnails of views that slide left or right across the top of the screen and then click to select the view you want – I’d like a drop down menu of views for faster selection – once I know what views exist it would make navigation much faster.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.