SearchMe - A Visual Search Engine

Tired of wearing your eyes out staring at tiny text every time you type a search string into Google? Wish you could see the contents of a page before you waste time clicking on it? SearchMe has an answer for you.

Founded by Randy Adams and John Holland in 2005, SearchMe entered beta in March and delivers an interface that allows users to flip through images of actual web pages as well as scroll through text descriptions. If it sounds like it would be painfully slow, think again. The search results actually pop up rather quickly.

However, that doesn't mean scrolling through them is quick. While the interface itself is fast and responsive, scrolling through images of web pages is inherently more time consuming than scrolling through text descriptions.

The text descriptions also leave a lot to be desired. Rather than displaying the meta description, SearchMe opts to display a piece of text from the page. But it doesn't do a very good job of picking out the text. In the case of a web trends article on social bookmarking, SearchMe displayed the list of categories rather than any meaningful text from the article.

Also, the search results themselves seem rather shaky. After doing a search for "web mashups", the only article from this website was the previously mentioned article on social bookmarking. This despite the fact there are actual articles on web mashups on this site. The social bookmarking article appeared to be chosen based mainly on the number of times "web" shows up in the categories list and the fact that "mashup" shows up once in the categories.

Which really makes me wonder why it chose the social bookmarking article considering that almost any page on this website would have displayed the word "web" just as many times and would also display "mashup" in the categories list.

Another worrying aspect of the search results is the following disclosure found on the about page: "We're partnering with companies that require priority spidering to be included in our index." While that is a little ambiguous, it certainly reads like the search results are skewed in favor of their partners. It is understandable that their partners would want to get something out of it, but playing favorites with the results certainly defeats the purpose of a search engine.

Despite these issues, SearchMe is still an intriguing website. While I don't think Google will be quaking in their boots anytime soon, it is a neat way to browse the web -- so long as you aren't in a hurry -- and it will be interesting to watch SearchMe's progress in the coming months.