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Is this the future of search? - Search me!
At the suggestion of an Internet marketing colleague I spent some time looking at this new search engine – www.searchme.com – and at first view was very impressed. It ticks all the Internet ‘state of the art’ boxes as it is very web 2.0 friendly and fully takes advantage of the latest web technology.
Searchme is the product of a new start up company based in Mountain View, California and no, they are not a Google spin off! Their goal is to develop the ‘next generation’ search engine with the backing of venture capital and $43 million later this is the result so far.
Currently searchme is in public beta and the initial search screen is very simplistic along the lines followed by Google with just a search box {initial-screen}. As soon as I started a trial search for ‘diamond earrings’ a series of categories in the form of little icons started to appear which would allow me to further refine my search {diamond-necklace} . A click on ‘jewellery’ led to the search results appearing and these were a series of thumbnail pictures of the results sorted by relevance presented in a very appealing way. {jewellery}
You can scroll through the pictures by using the slider and hovering over one of them pops up a snippet of text at the bottom of the picture comprising the title and, if present, the Meta description content. Clicking on a page will load it for you to look through it.
My first impression was ‘wow – what a cool tool’ and I can see why this would appeal to a lot of people. It would certainly make a lot of sense in the mobile internet market with the new generation of phones like the iphone.
However further thought around the psychology of search led me to wonder how well this concept would work. If you think about it someone out there looking for a product or service like the one you have to offer thinks of a phrase they consider relevant and types it into the search box. The results that appear need to be 100% related to their thinking in order to hook them and encourage them to make a click.
Whilst I have always believed in the old saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and can understand the visual appeal I do question whether a series of pictures of web pages and small ones at that is really going to satisfy the goals of the searcher. After all they have typed in a text query so surely you need text directly related to the conversation in their head in order to appeal to them.
It is certainly a great idea and at the end of the day it is not the likes of us that will decide its level of success but the wide world of Internet users will vote for it like everything else on the Internet. So the best of luck to searchme and it’s a brave company that decides to take on big G.
Sdo we think that Google going to be losing any sleep over this? Most probably not at the moment, $43 million may seem a huge investment to you and I but to Google it’s probably rated as pocket money.
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