Over at a forum I frequent a poster pointed us towards a great new search engine. I tried it out and am absolutely gobsmacked. This is the best  and freshest implementation of search technology I have come across on the web to date – and I browse the web often.

http://beta.searchme.com works on the basis of a visual search. You type in a search term and the results are not presented in the default text only format you get with google for instance, but you are presented with picture snapshots of the web pages where your term hit a result.

I like.

What’s more, you can refine your search with category buttons – it helps a lot when your term is rather generic, and speeds up the process of rummaging through results.

Features

  • Your results are presented not as text, but as visual snapshots of web pages.
  • You scroll through your results from left to right. It is modeled on the Compiz Fusion tabbed-paging, and Vista Ultimate users should also feel at home.
  • You can set some preferences – like theme.
  • It utilizes FLASH technology, so a flash-plugin is a must.
  • Catogory Buttons to refine your search.
  • It has a nifty feature that allows you to add Searchme to your Firefox search engines.
  • On mouse-over you can read a quick summary of the displayed page.

Pros

  • Visual Search – very intuitive, and helps you find exactly what you want without having to read summaries of search results, a glance is usually all you need to make sure this is what you want, a summary is available on mouse-over though.
  • Looks really nice.
  • Seems quite powerful, returns many results for a query.
  • This will soon replace google as my default search engine once all the bugs are sorted.

Cons

  • I tested Searchme on several PC’s and the experience was not consistent across all platforms.
  • The faster your PC, the smoother your experience.
  • Need a 3d graphics driver – one of my clunky PC’s has trouble with 3d, and Searchme would not display.
  • Flash is a must – this is not really a negative, but gnash (the free equivalent) does not work on one PC, but does on another – could also be an issue with 3d.
  • The results are fuzzy, and the mouse-overs summaries was fuzzy on my laptop too, but on the PC it was fine.

So there you have it – check it out!

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