A new way of searching the internet : Entrepreneurs Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson of the startup Spezify

Spezify is a search tool presenting results from a large number of websites in different visual ways.Spezify was founded in Stockholm, Sweden by Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson who have over 10 years experience within the creative digital industry. YourStory spoke to them about their venture and search enginesTell us about yourself , your background and experience before starting Spezify

We have both been working at different digital agencies for over ten years. Per as a designer and me as a flash developer. At times we have worked at the same place and did great things together. In 2007 i started to work at Tewonder where Per was working and after a while we started to think about new interesting things to create.

What is Spezify?

Spezify is a search tool presenting results from a large number of search engines in a different visual way.

We take web search further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience. We want you to get a good overview of a subject, find useful information and be inspired with Spezify.

We mix all media types and make no difference between blogs, videos, microblogs and images. Everything communicates and helps building the bigger picture.

We collect websites and are aiming to use as many relevant, free and open API:s as possible to generate extensive and diverse search results

What made you come up with the idea of a search engine like Spezify

The idea came from a need we had. In the initial phase of a new web/ad project we usually do some research and moodboards on the subject that we are working with. Sometimes it's just about getting a grip of what something really is. We usually did this bu browsing a lot of different sources; youtube videos, flicker, google images, Twitter etc. So suddenly we had this idea that it would be cool if we could just patch all of theese things together in some beautiful way. And thats the beginning of Spezify.We didnt really know what to use it for other than creative research, but for some reason we got really inspired by working with it. It was fun to do something without a limiting customer, to be able to create exactly what we wanted. So we really took the opportunity to experiment with the interface, making it as genious and beautiful as possible.

Tell us about some of the unique features of Spezify

Well I would say that the most unique thing is that we ruthlessly mix all types of content together. There are some other sites out there that make similar things as us, but they are always making strict and clear boundaries between different sources and content types. We took the chance to diffrentiate ourselves as much as possible from google standard and decided to make chaos instead.

How can publishers/developers use your API?

We don't have an open API at all so that is not possible. It is however, possible to embed Spezify with a predefined query on your own site sort of like a youtube video. check out http://embed.spezify.com for more info on that. This is a very new feature that is just to be officially released.

Is this the future of search? What are the trends we should watch out for?

I don't think that this type of inspired search will replace google at all. This is just an alternative that works really good on some specific areas. If you want an exact answer quickly google is still the king. Spezify has a much stronger focus on user experience and entertainment. People are spending quite a long time on our site, about five minutes in average, my guess is that visits on google last no more than 10 seconds because you quickly find what you are looking for and move ahead. On spezify you stay longer, examining the subject more in depth and keep browsing related words etc.

What are changes/modifications in the pipeline?

We are always experimenting with new ideas on user interface and design. It is a never ending progress. And of course we also always keep our eyes open for new interesting APIs that we can add to the mix. The new facebook graph API has a lot of potential and that is for sure something that will get into Spezify in the near future in one way or another.