Oolone

Oolone is a Visual search engine developed by Oolone.com. It is a search engine that gives results as images of websites instead of blocks of text. It was launched in January 2012.
Overview
Launched in January 2012, Oolone claims to make searching the internet more intuitive and interactive. When a user enters a search term, the screen zooms in to their top four results presented as images of the resulting websites. On the interactive results page, users are able to hover over an image tile to enlarge it for a better view. Users can also scroll back or forward for more sets of visual results.
The founders of Oolone claim that visual searching fits with our brain’s evolutionary make-up, and that their interactive design renders the ‘back button’ almost unnecessary. The site also claims to be 'big on privacy' , stating that they don't store search queries.
Origins
Oolone was co-founded by two brothers; their website states that Chris, a medical doctor with a background in neuroscience, looked at the way the brain works and saw that text was inefficient in terms of memory and recognition. His brother Jon realised that they could improve the way we search the web . They provide multiple references to scientific literature about this topic .
The organisation also bases it’s visual search on the belief that many in the industry have alluded to it’s use in the past, quoting such figures as Google Product Manager Nate Smith (“We realized that for many searches the best answer wasn’t text - it was an image or a set of images”) and Bob Baxley from commenting at Yahoo! (“Visual appearance is one of the most effective variables for quickly differentiating one application from another”).
It also draws on the history of text-based interfaces (MS-DOS) being replaced by graphic based interfaces (Windows) as technological advances make it possible. The founders argue that people prefer and naturally interact with images more easily, and that as bandwidth has increased it has now become possible to provide image-based search results, similar to past advancements in computer user interfaces.
Etymology
The website's name is reportedly an adaptation of the Ohlone people, otherwise known as the Costanoan, a Native American people of the Central California coast. In their culture, the hummingbird - whose wings beat in a figure of 8 - was believed to bring fire to the world.
In their adaptation of the name, Oolone have incorporated the figure of 8, or infinity symbol, to represent the near-infinite amount of information available on a dynamic internet.
A link can also be drawn between the location of the Ohlone villages and the location of modern day Silicon Valley , an area which contains many of the worlds largest technology corporations .
Use in Education
Since it's launch, Oolone has had much use and interest from educators around the world , Multiple sources have cited it's use as a teaching resource for younger students, students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), for Teachers of EFL and potentially for those with Special Educational Needs.

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