Bryns Brain is a visual search engine that's crawled out from under the woodwork. It's trying to challenge the likes of RedZee and SearchMe. To be honest, it's a bit like leprosy battling it out with TB and Malaria to see which comes out on top. Anyway...
You put in your search terms (you may be able to do more than phrase searching, but there's no advanced search function, no help screens, no examples, so you're out there on your own, with the forbidding dark screen) and then you're faced with a tiny teensy screen with 9 little thumbnails on them. What are they of? You have no way of telling - these beasties are small. Disconcertingly they also move due to 'Tiltviewer' every time you use the mouse.
Eventually of course your curiosity gets the better of you, so you click. And the thumbnails get bigger, so you can actually get a little feel for what's on the page. One nice thing is that you can 'flip' the page over to get a brief summary. Now, this is the fun part. You've looked at the top three, and then you've got to try and manipulate your mouse so you can get a small snippet on screen of the next row of three. Failing that, you click elsewhere on the screen, this takes you back to the thumbnail overview and you can try again. I will confess I only discovered this by accident. 2 mouse clicks to move to new results - that's an interesting concept!
Results were uneven. I had a total of 10 results for the word 'confederate'. For my 'country search engines' term I had 17 results - there was a gap in the 9 maxtrix, a bit like a missing tooth.
To be fair, it's only in Beta at the moment. And I'm unusually caustic, even for me, this morning. But really - these things are just such a pain.
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