Meh.

Too short? I’ll define “Meh”. I like the idea of “carrying” my search history between devices but Google does that. The visual search aspect of Axis is interesting but I think there’s a reason visual search hasn’t caught on. One, it takes longer to load images of web pages than it does text. Axis on a mobile device is slow. Not quite Christmas in July slow but still slow by today’s standards. Two, unless I know the site I’m looking for, visual doesn’t really help. A text description of the site’s content however is very helpful. There’s a reason Craigslist and Drudge report just use text. It’s easier and quicker. Besides, Google results are both text and visual (via a rollover are to the right of each result). Firefox has a function that let’s you view your most used sites in a visual search and that’s pretty useful but only because I already know what the sites I go to often look like.

Maybe I’m missing something. It’s quite possible as I haven’t spent a ton of time playing with it. But my overall impression is that it doesn’t improve text based search results—it’s just different and different isn’t enough.