A recent user research project conducted by Click Suite involved us creating a physical browsing space where people could scan and select content which was printed on A4 sheets of paper.

To view a piece of content all the user had to do was reach over and pick it up!

They gravated toward visuals and colour, whereas text-based or black and white content was largely ignored. That came as no surprise.

But hang on...

If that's the case then why are we faced with text-based content in black and white every day when using search engines such as Google? How did we get so far away from 'natural selection'?

This approach with a more physical search just felt so obvious, as well as being intuitive and fun. Several people commented "This is so much better than Google!".

I likened it to scavenging for something precious in a junk shop, or compiling a scrapbook from cuttings. It just felt natural.

Observing this process made me realise just how much text-query search engines such as Google have influenced the way we seek information over the past decade. But now that they're digitising physical documents, could that be about to change?

Other search engines have tried to design a more visual search.

Here's a few of my favourites:

 
spezify creates a cluster of image, video and article thumbnails based on your (text) search query.



oskope allows you to visually search over amazon, ebay, flickr and others, with the ability to arrange results as a grid, stack, pile, list or graph.

viewzi is a search engine aggregator with a plethoria of different ways to explore content.


There's also a trend towards a more 'vertical search' approach where the search results are crafted around a specific topic or industry (e.g. real estate, comic books, recipes).

Here's an example of a real estate search on the iPad:


Zillow on the iPad app lets you browse photo galleries of homes using tap, swipe, pinch and drag in order to view values, homes for sale or rent, and more. You can also filter searches by price, beds, baths and more.

So while I believe text-based search will always be with us, it's inevitable that as we move toward touch-screen user interfaces we will also gravitate toward search engines which have more emphasis on visuals and browsing - which, based on our research - people love!