• StraightUpSearch, Thursday, May 15, 2008 12:49 PM

Who says search has to be about text links? Not Like.com and Viewzi, two alternative engines have made images a core factor in core search.

Like.com is a must for shop-a-holics, as "this visual search engine uses both text and images as queries to make shopping more convenient," says Alex. Searchers can scour the Web using a product photo or text query, and the engine will return results as indexed from a list of available retailers. Like.com also allows users to refine their query by product attributes like color, style or pattern.

Viewzi expands that premise beyond shopping, and offers searchers multiple options for viewing their results. There's a screenshot view, which shows Yahoo search results as, well ... screenshots. Photo and video views pull content from sources like Flickr, YouTube and Blinkx, while Amazon book view and weather view round out the diverse visual options.

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