The Stalwart: New Graphical Search From Amazon

Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) is experimenting with the graphical search software Flowser. While the company actually refers to it as a browsing tool, we'll be straight and call it what it is- graphical search. Google (NSDQ:GOOG), you watching this?

So why the name "Flowser"? Well yep you guessed it, its a browser which displays results in flower-shaped diagrams... the site is here.

Basically what this graphical browser does is show you a graphical diagram (flower) of related items in the Amazon database based on your search queries. It reminds us of business competitor tree diagrams we used to access over at Hoovers. They would expand and collapse as we clicked on different companies. But Amazon has taken it farther and made it pretty detailed and a bit fun as well with telephone key tones sounding off as we navigate around. They also have a search query built into the graphics as well.

Overall, looks like a great idea from Amazon. While browsing items online is pretty easy already, perhaps it can become more entertaining through interesting graphical interfaces. Here, we say make it sort of like a mindless video game. "Not only does it give me great search results but it also makes me feel like I'm flying through cyberspace." One small step for Amazon, one giant leap for graphical search...

The more we think of it, this might work well with a pure music store such as Apple's (NSDQ:AAPL) iTunes. You could easily see related music to what you were looking for and leap frog to new artists three levels away from your original query. Such an interface could work for social networking as well. Would surely be better than those boxes full of square friend photo's lined up.

What's Amazon turning into? Web Services? Marketing in a virtual role-playing game? And now this pic of us flowsing their website below. Click to enlarge.

What is This?

The Stalwart is a blog written by Joseph Weisenthal, covering such topics as stocks, business, economics, politics, technology, gambling, chess, poker, economics, current events, music, math, Chinese food, science, randomness, kurtosis, sports, evolutionary fitness, and anything else of the author's choosing. The words contained herein are the author's own, not affiliated with any other firm or employer.

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Comments

Hi, there seems to be some confusion about the creator of Flowser.

This was not created by Amazon.com!

A member of our developer community created it and he deserves all of the credit!

Posted by: Jeff Barr | November 02, 2006 at 09:44 AM

Actually using it is entirely incoherent. Everything moves when you touch it, assorted ambiguous icons, busy design -- a complete sh*tshow imo. Maybe the idea has legs, but I think text search will be more efficient for a long time.

At first, I thought they had a true graphical search -- namely a SE that can report back what was in images. Now that would be awesome. The first widespread use would surely be for porn.

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