Instead of thinking "specify" when I saw the name of this search engine, I somehow assumed it was a new app from the brain of a certain Reddit co-founder.
"Have you dugg up all the old news and reddit all? Are you so googled out that your bing is broken? Try new SPEZIFY, with secret alien search technology!"
I didn't actually get to try spezify out yet, because it crashed my browser (but that MAY be because I had something like 200 windows open at the time.) Is it a really heavy UI?
"What the...? Flash? Why the hell would a search engine need to be use flash for an input?"
"Ohhh...OK, interesting. Wait, what? Why do I start near the bottom of the page? Ahhh, I can't scroll to the top! It keeps adding crap!"
"OK, fine, I'll explore...errr...wow, a lot of this stuff is nowhere near what I wanted." [close tab]
I searched for git, and got a lot of random stuff, like this Very Special tweet: "This Jamaican bitch next to me has no idea what her accent is doin to me rite now......She can git it doggy and froggy style."
I was really disoriented browsing through it. The scroll bars kept changing size the whole time, and starting at the bottom-right is weird for me. Eventually the content was all filled though.
Also, I couldn't copy text from the page. I tried to copy that tweet directly from the search page, but it would just display a box saying it came from twitter and giving me a button that just said "twitter.com."
It then took me to that guy's main page (not even the specific page for that tweet), where I then had to hunt for the specific tweet to copy. I should note that double-clicking doesn't appear to bring you to the link either -- you have to hit the button that displays only the domain name.
If I'm looking mainly for tweets and images, this might be an interesting tool to use, but honestly it's just doesn't fit the way I like to search.
Eh, I agree with all the problems people have pointed out...but it still kicks ass. I can't properly articulate what it is, but it's the same thing I liked about Google 10 years ago.
It knows what I want. I love the interface, in fact, it's superb. I will use this every day, and I am very hard to move on search.
Faults: search text too big, looks fisher price. Does not respond dynamically to my selection, should refine further. Still, awesome.
Wow, my experience was exactly the opposite of most of the folks here.
After one search, and said "ouch, my eyes!" and swore never to go back. It was like feeding feeding the first two pages of Google results to a cat, and then having the cat vomit all over your monitor. Random information spew isn't a feature I'm looking for, thanks.
I think that this engine it's not suited to every query out there. Perharps it must target a niche; image, geographic, people, companies & institutions come to my mind.
If the result set to return is too large, an eye fish view might help to put more info in the same space.
This is the first of the "new search engines" I've seen that I will probably go back to.
On several queries I tried, the results were better than google's for me. I'm not saying that spezify is better, just that there is value in good but different.
I think it's pretty neat. When I look up my company, it's like a chronicle of my recent life in photos, annotated by my tweets: http://www.spezify.com/#/trailbehind
this seems to work best when you're not really searching for anything in specific. I searched for a band and it was fun just browsing the results, something I wouldn't normally do in google.
"Have you dugg up all the old news and reddit all? Are you so googled out that your bing is broken? Try new SPEZIFY, with secret alien search technology!"
But wait, there's more...