What’s Izik? Introducing a swipier, slashier search

I’ve been searching for a search tool that makes me want to search on my iPad.

I think I’ve found one that will work for me and for my students.

Specially for tablets, Izik by Blekko is a new, free search app for iPad and android. Results are organized by contextual categories in an image-rich page, with convenient options for social sharing.

Izik offer a swipie, portable, pretty experience that inspires discovery and quick access to information with minimal typing.

Typing is replaced by the following swipiness:

• Swipe horizontally to view more results in one of the thousands of izik search categories.
• Swipe vertically on the page to find more categories related to your topic.
• Swipe through expanded results or images.
• Expand any result to see more and share the article with your friends.
• Quick answer boxes that help you find what you need right away.

At first search, it may appear that Izik does not offer the precision of a well-constructed, traditional advanced search.  That it is heavily focused on things trendy.

But Izik is more than a swipie, pretty search.  Precision is possible.

Blekko’s spam-resistant, user-driven, transparent search based on human curation, presents the option to filter by slashtag.

My search on globalization offered these categories to examine: quick answers, top results, images, money, economics, books, or latest.

I discovered a variety of reliable leads, especially under the latest tab, but my search wasn’t focused enough to be meaningful.

By adding a slashtag, /conservative, I was able to filter results by point of view. Users may continue to refine by adding additional slashtags.

Izik suggested a variety of additional filters before and after I typed that slashmark. For instance, pursuing the suggested globalization/anti-globalization pdf revealed a wide variety of government documents and white papers, very useful for high school research.

You may also want to consider exploring Blekko as a serious option for your non-tablet searches.

Filed under: androids, search tools