Spezify: gorgeous interface for visual search

Search engines are meant to be quick, dirty and efficient. But what if you’re looking for something less tangible — like the right creative spark?

Spezify is a search aggregator with designers in mind. Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson, who work at Swedish digital marketing agency Tewonder, wanted an easy way to find visual inspiration through search.

While most real-time search engines display results in an ordered list, Spezify shows them off in a draggable interface inspired by the iPhone. It’s an attractive example of how the experience of a search results page could be turned upside down. Spezify pulls up results from Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay, MSN and Flickr.

“As a designer, you’re often looking for the essence of a word. We were sitting on Flickr, Twitter and Google Images and thought it would be great to have one place that collects all this stuff,” said Ekenstam.

Spezify rides on image search results from other engines and is a hobby project for now, Ekenstam said, although a few other visual search engines have pulled in funding in the last year, like Superfish, which raised $5.3 million in January and Like.com, which closed a $32 million round last fall. Like and Superfish have their own in-house search technology, where a user can either pick an image they like and find ones with similar details or they can describe a visual they’re looking for and then come up with matching results.