The other day I came across a new visual search engine that called oSkope. I believed it has been released on the web for a month or two. As stated on their landing page, oSkope is a visual browser that fetch and organize the items from Web services such as Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube. Users are allowed to select one of these four services and play around with it, the search results display can be viewed in a variety of ways such as in the mode of grid, stack, pile, list or graph. Click on one of the thumbnail images that can be enlarged when mousing over, and in the right-hand side of the image will display a dialog box that list the item’s product and price information. For an instance, a book image fetched from Amazon will list the book’s particular details. For every book, you will find that there is a link that provided in order for an user to go to the Amazon’s original book page and buy the book.

Visually, oSkope meet the users’ needs when they want to get a better browsing experience. The establishment of these visual search engines tend to complement the existing search engines such as Google or Yahoo! However, if I’m looking for a specific book or photo, I prefer go to the Amazon or Flickr Website and enter the specific search query. Nevertheless, there is still room left for a visual search engine to further grow on the Web and oSkope might well situated to make money through the referral programs of Amazon or eBay.