Search Me

If you go to searchme.com within the next couple of hours you’ll be able to get one of the 800 or so invites that are left for the ‘unique’ search engine.

One of the things that annoys me the most about the current batch of search engines is how hit and miss it can be. Basically - if I search for something like Gerald Durrell or upyourego I have to visit the page and hunt around looking for the reference on that page to my search term.

Sometimes, when researching a story the reference to your search term can be burried quiet far down the page and so you may either 1) miss it completely or 2) spend hours looking for it.

Well now that’s all got a lot easier with a new visual search engine called Searchme that’s basically a web and text version of cover flow - with live updates.

Basically you type a search term and the results come up in the form of pretty large LIVE screen grabs from the site in question - it also highlights the word you searched for on that screen grab in yellow to make it easier to find.

You can see it working in this demo:




The Search Me ‘Backgrounder’ information basically describes it as a search engine for everyone - you type, you see and you click through.

Searchme sorts your search results into relevant topics, then lets you scroll through and preview the web pages associated with your query, before you click through. As you start typing, category icons appear that relate to your search. For example, if you type “bonds”, it suggests “savings” or “stocks” or “baseball”. Choose a category, and you’ll see pictures of the web pages that match your search. You can quickly review these pages to find the best one, then go right to that site.

The category is an interesting one to be honest - as long as you don’t hit enter (there’s no search button) as soon as you type the word in it will give you a list of related categories you can use to pin down and filter results.




In the example above I typed in Barak Obama and it gave me democratic party, politicians, political news, campaigns & elections and african american culture. I then typed in House of Lords and it offered european union, restaurants, courts, history and um… music.

At the moment, while still in beta, Search Me only has around a billion pages indexed but a billion pages is still more than enough to find almost anything you want - but compare it to the 8 billion Google indexes and you see why it isn’t quiet there yet for the more obscure results.

But when the index is up to full speed it will be a real contender - this is more than just another novelty search engine - it seems to have an impressive algorithm AND has one of the best search interfaces I’ve seen in a LONG time.

It also lets you decide whether to have the background light


Or dark


Personally I prefer the light one although I think the dark one is probably better for my screen, my eyes and the environment.

But you can go more traditional if you don’t fancy scrolling through the visaul display - by clicking a little arrow at the bottom of the page you can switch on the text results.



The only problem I’ve noticed with the site so far is the speed of the scroll bar - it’s just a little bit too sensitive for my liking - I can keep up with it and skipped over a couple of results on more than one occasion.

I’m certainly going to give it ago - the problem is breaking the habit of typing in Google.co.uk when going to search for something. I’ll let you know how I get on when I actually need to use it to find information on a story.

Searchme was founded in 2005 by Randy Adams, CEO, and John Holland, CMO, and received initial funding from Sequoia Capital.

Share/Save