ICONLook - Another Icon Search Engine

Back in November of 2007, I wrote a blog post in which I reviewed an icon search engine called Iconlet. In the review, I compared the differences/similarities between Iconlet and Google’s own image search for locating icons. It appears as though a newcomer is looking to join the icon search engine niche. The service is called ICONLook.

The ICONLook front page is very simple. You’re presented with the iconlook logo, search bar and search button while at the bottom of the page are three links. Link exchange, Tag Cloud and Random Icons. Since web 2.0 icons still seem to be fairly popular, I typed Web 2.0 Icons into the iconlook search bar. Upon clicking on the search button, I was presented with 0 results. So when the search term was refined to Web 2.0 instead, I netted the same results. I find that to be pretty disappointing. So, for this review I’ll just use the tried and true method of RSS.

Typing RSS into the search bar ended up giving me at least one page full of results.

One thing I noticed with Iconlook is that, once you perform a search, a list of icon size filters appears under neath the search bar. Why this is not included on the default home page for Iconlook is beyond me as that is where I would want to use to the filters, not after the search has been performed. Speaking of the filters, they are nothing more than size filters. The sizes range from 12X12 all the way up to 128X128. As for my search results, a number of the icons were of the 16 px variety while only a few were 32px and above.

Clicking on a search result takes you a page dedicated to that icon. This pages lists detailed information in regards to the icon such as it’s name, URL, CC License, number times the icon has been downloaded, TAGS, and a convenient ICO file. Providing an ICO file directly from this page saves user’s a step or two when wanting to use a 16X16 sized image as a bookmark icon.

Using the tabs provided under the search bar, you can browse the site via tags. When you click on the TAGS tab, you’ll be presented with a tag cloud. Larger, bolder tags represent a higher number of results while smaller tags represent a smaller number of results. Based on what I could see, iconlook contains a large number of tags, but the tag cloud presents an at a glance look as to the number of icons contained within their search index for a particular category.

Remember when I told you that Iconlook contained a link for Random Icons? At the time this review was being written, the random icons link appeared to be broken. The link would load what appeared to be a page filled with random icons. However, when I went back to the homepage and clicked on the link again, the results were the same, making it not so random.

One of the other gripes I have about this site is that it is not consistent. The iconlook index page was the only one which contained the three links within the footer. Anytime you browsed one level further into the site, the footer disappears. Also, probably one of the biggest complaints I have about this site is the lack of an about page. As far as I’m concerned, the ABOUT page is the most important page on any website. Without it, user’s have no freaking clue as to what the site’s real purpose is. So take everything I say within this review as experience as Iconlook fails to provide an ABOUT US page.

As for the icons themselves, it appears to me as though they are not crawling the net, indexing various icon packs. Instead, icons/icon packs appear to be stored on the Iconlook server itself and once added, they are added to the in house search index. I say this because there does not appear to be a pattern in regards to the licenses and icon authors being used.

So in the end, I still think Google image search or your favorite blog which posts news items regarding icon-packs that have been released are still your best bet in retrieving good looking icons. It’s worth noting that Iconlook does have a decent sized category of excellent looking icons, it’s just that it didn’t satisfy my appetite and I was looking for something a little more.