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Will You SearchMe?
By Joseph Hunkins at June 01, 2008 6 Comments
Startup Search Engine SearchMe.com has no shortage of capital - the visually impressive search engine has already raised about $44 million from such venture luminaries as Sequoia and Lehman Brothers, and DAG Ventures.
The approach is interesting and fairly unique. Searchme allows you to actually browse results pages from a very appealing “page flipping” user interface.
Is this a more intuitive way to choose “good” results than a big results page list at Google? I think the short term answer is no, but the long term answer is probably yes. Google’s effectiveness is partly from fairly high search quality but also the appeal of a simple, information intuitive interface we’ve all come to know and most of us like. However for some users the Google results are too overwhelming, leaving them confused about choosing from dozens of text snippets, many of which are only partly representative of the search query. More importantly, as bandwidth improves and monitor sizes increase there is likely to be a substantial market for much more graphically intensive user interfaces, and SearchMe is certainly a prime candidate for that market.
Labels: searchme
6 Comments
Interesting service. Looks like Google meets StumbleUpon…
holy smokes it killed my Opera!
Have you tried viewzi? We have a search similar to searchme.com as well as several others, depending on the type of search being performed. In addition we will have a publicly available API so developers and designers can build their own search interfaces.
You can give it a try by using “gio” as your referral code at http://www.viewzi.com/invites. We’ll launch our new engine to the public in June.
-giovanni
Hmmm…
Well, it does look awfully nice, but it also looks an awful like iTunes and iPhone. I sure hope they have a lot of money, because Apple is going to sue them!
Hate to rain on your parade, guys!
It’s surely a great thing that at least ONE COMPANY has innovative visual designers. If it weren’t for Apple’s design team sites like this would just be..um… search engines.
this is a weeknight project in Google Mashups or Yahoo! Pipes, hardly a business model worth the millions being poured into it.
You might also like http://www.flowww.com/
It uses a similar coverflow interface for tech news.