I’ve just found out about search-cube, the search engine that displays the results as a cube of screen shots that you spin and rotate and enlarge for preview before you visit them (it’s powered by Google and based on Thumbshots).
Here’s the final result of a search for “Medical Museion” on search-cube. The static search-result image is great in itself — yet it is much less evocative than the process of dynamic build-up of the cube, which takes about ten seconds during which each of the six sides of the cube is filled (a total of 6×16 images). And when you move it around you get a much more ‘material + visual’ feeling of the search than you will get from an ordinary Google text search.
As a comparison, a middlespot search is a rather flat experience:
Visualizing applications doesn’t seem to slow down. Wonder if the current economic recession will boost or put a temporary break on the development?