Today, I got a private beta invite from SearchMe, a visual search engine, which is trying to make web search more lively. SearchMe is Mountain View, California based company and has got funding to the tune $31 million with Sequoia capital as lead investors.

SearchMe’s interface is built on Flash which creates a collection of pictures of web pages for a search term. The user can browse through the pictures one by one and click on the image in focus to go to the web page. Overall, I found the interface to be pretty with Apple like look and feel and an interesting way of search by viewing pages.

There are a lot of other startups competing in this space including ManagedQ which pulls results from Ask and images from Snap for providing results. With Ask at the backend, ManageQ provides better results than SearchMe as of now.
SearchMe still needs to work on relevance and quantity of results. They claim to have indexed almost a billion pages and adding more to it continuously. Any search startup aiming to compete with Google has to be equally relevant and vast. You cannot compete with Google with some nice way of putting pages in front of the users. When I am searching for something on the Internet, I want to see more relevant results irrespective of the format they are presented in.

As for now, we can just wait and give SearchMe some time to capture more images and index more web pages so that they can provide improve the relevance of results.

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