SearchMe.com - Cool and Useful Visual Search
One of the coolest search engines I’ve seen in a while is SearchMe.com. While it performs different search functions like most other search engines out there; web, images, news, and video. What sets Searchme.com apart from other search engines is the way it displays the search results. Reminiscant of iTunes’s cool scrolling cover gallery, SearchMe.com uses a horizontal screenshot gallery of the resulting web pages.
In using SearchMe.com, I’ve found several advantages and disadvantages to this approach. For starters, the advantages; I actually use searchme.com in my everyday life here at “The List”. I get 10’s of inclusion requests every day and most are actual, legitimate sites. However, as with anything on the web, we do get the occasional spam or fishing sites that manage to wiggle past the defences. SearchMe.com comes in very handy in seeing what is on the other end of that link, without putting my computer, files, and identity at risk.
It also provides a neat way to pre-scan the pages and highlight the search terms present on the site.
The one main drawback I’ve been finding is the computer resources it takes up. I’m using a pretty average machine… 2.26GHZ Pentium 4 Dell, running Windows XP w/ 1GB of Ram, but when I do a search, it always seems to slow the browser. This happens on both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.
All in all, I think it’s a great tool and one that might be interesting to watch for future developments.
From Searchme.com:
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.
Simply put, Searchme lets you see what you’re searching for, before you click through.
via: AltSearchEngines.com
August 22nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
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