As vast as Amazon, eBay, Flickr, and YouTube have become, I welcome any tool that promises to make their warehouses of content more intimate, more navigable. oSkope — a "visual search assistant" — goes a long way toward doing just that. You can search any of these four sites (soon to be more, they promise) and results will appears as a set of thumbnails displayed in whatever format you prefer: grid, stack, pile, list or, my personal favorite, graph — a 4-square matrix that clusters results by timeliness and popularity. Each thumbnail carries along enough info to tell you if it's worth the click. (YouTube results will play right on the page.) Create a free account and you can drag and drop results into a folder for future reference. I could get used to this…

Sam Cannon