The 150 images will be displayed in a zoomable and movable area. The mouse wheel can be used to zoom in and out of the area to inspect images closely. Pressing the left mouse button in the area makes it possible to move around which is handy if some images are not displayed because of the zoom level.

It is also possible to use the zoom slider on the right sidebar to zoom in and out of the main area. The second step is the refining phase. The user drags and drops images that fit best to the right sidebar. A double-click is the alternative method of selecting those images. To give an example. A user searching for the game Diablo might enter Diablo in the search form. The resulting pictures will show images of Diablo 1, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. It is then possible to only select Diablo 3 images from the first batch to tell the search that these are the images to find and display from then on.

Pixolu will then search for and display images that are closely related to the selected images of step 2. The url, resolution and source of selected images will be shown. The only way to view images in full resolution is to load them by clicking on the source url in the sidebar.

Better search is always good, but as a lot of people have been expressing, searching in natural language (“what is the capital of France?”) is not too useful for anyone who has used the Internet up to now. What I would like to see in a search engine is one that can differentiate “free” products from “free download!” or “free 30 day trial!”

Anyway for such a dominated market with Google going on over 60% market share (and even more mind share) a lot of competitors pop up quite frequently. For many niche markets and specific type searches these can be much better, so here are a couple of the better ones:

FilesTube

A search engine for file sharing. FilesTube indexes downloadable files across the Internet. Works quite well, especially with the filtering of files to ‘mp3’, ‘mpeg’ etc.

PDF Search Engine

A search engine for PDFs, E-Books and other electronic documents. Has simple but effective searching.

Twingly

Mentioned it here a few days ago. A new blog search engine, I’m interested to see who it manages to compete against the larger but ailing Technorati which recently got a new round of funding.

Icon Look

I’ve seen a few Icon search engines but Icon Look is the best one I’ve used both results wise and its interface. You’ll find both small and high resolution icons, a useful resource for anyone doing design work.

Retrevo

This service is designed to match a product with a manual. Actually a very good search engine for doing product research before purchasing.

Look Torrent

I used Scrape Torrent for quite some time, but I recently found Look Torrent which is an awesome search engine for finding torrent files. Its best feature is the option to select your favourite torrent sites for it to search.