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The shopping site Etsy, which focuses on buying and selling handmade items, has an interesting color-based search widget. As you drag your cursor over the color grid, circular swatches enlarge and clicking them will cause Etsy to pull up items matching the color.
There's a couple of other innovative ways to search Etsy, something called “Time Machine” which I think lists items as they were added by seller, but then again it could items the were recently purchased — I can't quite figure it out.
My personal favorite is “Treasury” which I think lets you watch what other people are browsing in realtime. Cursors dart across the screen with that users profile picture (if they have one).
Then there's Connections, which is sort of a shopping version of They Rule. People and products form nodes and clicking on a person brings up the products they've marked as favorites as well as that users' friends.
Etsy runs a little slow, though some of that may be that they wound up on Digg today. This is probably old news to some and the creative browsing methods may qualify as useless eye candy, but Etsy's search methods are sort of fun and definitely different.
Color Search:
Treasury:
