Searching by terms is great. But some things are just easier to find when you can actually look at them – especially if you tend to be more visually oriented. Book dust jackets, album covers, and product packaging, for example, tend to register with some people far more easily than names. And, then of course, there’s video. When you’re looking for a video, you’re likely looking for that video. So, wouldn’t it be great if you could quickly scan thumbnails to find that YouTube video you were seeking? Now, you can with Wibe7.tv.
Wibe7.tv allows you to perform YouTube searches and return results based on relevance, views, rating, or publish date. Granted, nothing earth-shattering there. Instead, it’s the way the results are arranged that makes finding that video you’re seeking much easier. It’s strikingly similar to PicClick, a visual search of Amazon and eBay we reviewed last year.
Rather than present an obtrusive column of thumbnails coupled with large blocks of text – like YouTube’s search results – Wibe7.tv discards the text, opting instead for a mosaic of thumbnails – giving you the visual content you were seeking. Suddenly, scanning the screen for your favorite video becomes a great deal easier.
Just as important, Wibe7.tv’s matrix of thumbnails helps you weed out the inevitable duplicate videos that crowd YouTube. (In fact, I found myself entering a number of search terms just to see how many duplicates existed for popular videos.)
Once you find the video you want, clicking on the thumbnail begins playing the full-size video in the lower corner of your browser window. Or, you can always click through to YouTube.
While the mosaic is a helpful first pass, I found myself wishing for some mouseover functionality to deliver additional information on the content. Having to play each video to get more information becomes a bit laborious if you don’t see what you want right off the bat.
Still, the ability to quickly scan for the video – instead of scrolling through multiple pages of YouTube results – made the service a welcome improvement over searching on YouTube for content.
To start looking for those YouTube videos you’ve been seeking, visit Wibe7.tv.
