пятница, 4 марта 2011 г.

Facebook Visual Search: get what you need

Recently I made a humble attempt to find a classmate with the Facebook in-built search. His name is quite common, John Milton, so I got quite a few search results for my request. Facebook outputs those in portions, and you have to click See More Results again and again. After 6 or 7 attempt I got tired and gave up, I envy those who can stand this for more than 10 minutes!

I almost forgot my failure when the story got an unexpected pushup. A friend of mine told me about an app called Facebook Visual Search that he believed was quite a thing for browsing Facebook.

Frankly speaking, after my first failure I was reluctant to go on but he insisted. Once again, I entered John Milton in the search box. The app started searching. Once the results were visualized I guessed why it was not as fast as the in-built Facebook search: Visual Search downloads all avatars at once!

By default, avatars are displayed in a table view and fill the most of the screen. By clicking you switch to the grid view mode, the photos are displayed systematically in named columns considering the applied sorting. First Name is the default sorting parameter.

Viewing and handling found profile photos (avatars) is even easier in the full-screen mode 
To zoom your visual search results in or out, drag the zooming slider
Clicking a photo displays an information box with a link to the respective Facebook page:
Clicking Send Message or Add as Friend allows you to contact the person directly or make friends with her or him.

On the left-hand pane, I saw some statistic data retrieved for my search:
Clicking Last Name, Gender, and Language I get further statistics. By default, data is sorted by quantity (profiles containing Mary as the first name are most frequent). Clicking Sort: Quantity changes the sorting to the alphabetical order (Sort: A-Z).

But what’s really tremendous is filtering! Your initial output of contacts matching your search may be too numerous. However you can easily dismiss unnecessary search results by applying a filter on the left-hand pane. Select proper check boxes for the person's first and last name, gender, and language and Visual Search will do its magic: ‘bad’ results will disappear. You can also filter by surname, gender, and selected language preferences.
Surprisingly, the person I was looking for was called John Bradley Milton. Once I took a look at the filter I saw the name. By selecting it (see the screenshot above), I got a single photo – the one I needed! Of course I had known the name earlier but just couldn’t make up my mind and enter the correct search request!

You may also need to sort the found entries. Quick sorting is possible by using a helpful sorter in the top right corner:
You can select a sorting parameter: first name, last name, gender, language, or id. The respective sorting will be simultaneously applied. It will be easier to manage results if you are in the grid view mode.
I really like the tool and recommend it to everyone.

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