Meet Izik, A Search Engine for Tablets
While Google, Yahoo and Bing may have all modified the mobile versions of their search engines to make them more tablet-friendly, no company – until now – has created a search engine that is specifically designed for tablets.
Enter blekko, inventors of the new Izik search engine made just for iPads, Kindle Fires, Microsoft Surface tablets and other similar tablet devices. The new search engine, while functional on personal computers, is tailored specifically to the touchscreen interfaces and smaller viewing areas found on tablets.
Izik is now available as an application for both Android and iOS operating systems, and as a mobile browser-based search engine as well. If you are looking to enhance your capability and functionality on your tablet, now is your opportunity to do so.
What’s Different About Izik?
Izik starts by totally changing the way SERPs (search engine results pages) are presented. Rather than a list that you scroll through vertically, you’re presented with categories that your search might fall into. You can then swipe horizontally to see additional results, or tap the category name to expand the view and see more results for that category at one time.
For example, my search for “steak marinade” produced several categories: Looking For, Top Results, Recipes, BBQ and Latest. In line with these categories was also a category just for images, which is included with many SERPs stemming from a photogenic keyword. It’s actually quite handy because I can expand the “Looking For” and “Top Results” categories if I want to learn more about steak marinades in general, or expand the “Recipes” and “BBQ” categories if I want to get straight to how to make it.
What’s Good, What Needs Work
Many tablet users will probably love Izik for the convenient, organized navigation that relies on swiping, as well as the way information is presented visually. Individual search results are more segmented and visually distinctive than in Google, which should come in even more handy on a 7-inch or 10-inch display. Compared with the tablet version of Google, Izik also manages to pack more information into each page.
The “not-so-good,” as reported by Search Engine Land during some initial tests, is that Izik is lacking in the areas of local search and recent news. It sometimes fails to find the most recent version of a news story, and finding things like maps, addresses and phone numbers in local search takes a couple extra steps of digging. These are minor issues that will likely be fixed quickly in future versions of Izik.
What do you think? Will you be giving Izik a try on your tablet, or are you sticking to Google (or Yahoo, or Bing, for that matter)?
