I found this interesting reference to Flowser a graphical browser to Amazon on the Amazon Web Services Blog. With all the discussions of graphical search tools I thought that this would be worth checking out. It is pretty cool, but a bit busy when you “open” up a item. Still it is an interesting way of navigating especially when looking at different types of materials. Play with the demo and see what you think.
technorati tags:graphical+search+tools, flash
Looks interesting - but seems to come up with lots of unrelated items in the search output. e.g. try putting in ‘Library Blogs’. This did come up with an interesting looking book ‘Blogging and Rss: A Librarian’s Guide’ (Paperback) which I haven’t seen before but also wristwatches, gameboys and harmonica blues licks!
I would like to see an ‘Amazon.co.uk’ version.
Whilst on the subject of graphical search tools Kartoo (http://www.kartoo.com/) seems pretty good.
Search wise F*lowser isn’t any better or worse than the standard Amazon searching (which is what I believe it uses). If you do this kind of search in Amazon on the front page you get the same results. The “unrelated” items typically are sorted to the bottom of the results list. So you don’t see them. The interesting thing about F*lowser is that you see all the types of results a little more readily. At Amazon you get shown a list of results that Amazon has organized. So unless you were paying close attention or paging through lots of results you might not discover that there was a DVD or CD that matched your search. To me what is interesting about F*lower is the way it displays results and let’s you navigate through them. I like the way you can navigate to a particular type of media.