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Put simply, searchme provides a cover-flow interface for browsing websites by screen shots. You enter a search term and are presented a horizontal stack of images. At the top of the screen there are categories you can filter your search with and a button at the bottom to add a standard text-based list view of the data as well.
Technically searchme really shines. The images load quickly and the animations run more or less smoothly. It was built using Adobe Flex 3 and is a good example of a simple Flex app that performs well. My only complaint from a technical perspective is that my mouse wheel doesn't work on either the horizontal image stack or the text-based list, but that's more of a general critique of Flash/Flex than an actual problem with this application.
From an emotive standpoint, searchme is fun and cool. It brings a fun yet familiar interface to browsing the web. What I can't really decide about it is wether or not it's really useful. This kind of visual representation of a web search doesn't really lend itself to letting me sort and skim the data quickly, which is essential when you're looking for something new online. The question I keep asking myself is, would I ever use this application to search the web? Does it provide a user experience that's superior to my standard old boring Google?
Admittedly, I'm one of those people who's never really used the cover flow view on my Mac. It's not that I don't like it - I recognize that it's cool - it's just that I don't really enjoy the process of "searching" no matter how you slice it. Searching is a tedious task. I want...what I want - I don't want to spend time looking for it. Scrolling through searchme's visual interface just takes too much time for me to use in day-to-day web searching.
That being said, searchme really does shine in the process of "discovering." Unlike searching, discovering is about the journey - it's about looking through things and finding something new. Cover-flow is well suited to this task, though I wouldn't mind a short description to go along with the image.
In conclusion, searchme is a well built tool that brings cover-flow to the web. I'm excited to see how it develops in beta, what changes are made for the release, and where this application goes in the future.
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Interesting approach for this site, sort of like an RIA critic. I'd like to see more of this type of thought in the RIA world - "Just because you can doesn't mean you should". Keep it up.
I have been testing this application for a while and it is actually more responsive than I thought it would be. I like the way they continue to load up additional search results in the background.
Interesing site, does anyone knows how can I create those web pages thumbnails in Flex?
I think they're doing the thumbnails on the server - lots of different server technologies (including .NET and PHP) have that capability.
Absolutely useless.
Nice post RJ. To answer Jose's question, from what I understand, Flex is just front-ending the Searchme search technology, which is quite robust. They are creating the thumbs on the back-end, and storing them alongside the text content from each of the pages that they catalog.
Steve... not sure what's "absolutely useless" about the Searchme.com tool. I did a pretty hefty analysis of it, including benchmarking search performance and application performance (GUI).
I suppose we can agree to disagree, and you might not be the type of person that would benefit from a visual search user interface, but to call it "absolutely useless" is a little close minded, don't you think?
http://www.whatanexperience.org/2008/03/searchme-thrill-me-quick-review-of.html
- dave
We developed a competetor, a visual search engine in a very early public-beta stage. You can try it if you want at http://www.eaglefind.com/
Thanks Joel. It's nice that I can see more search results in this one, but it's still leaving me hanging. I think the trick with visual search is to take what's done well so far - a la google - and add to it, rather than trying to replace it with a totally new interface. Maybe I'm wrong and we'll see something great that's totally new, but I think a "google with screen shots" would be a great first step.
Am I the only person out here who can't get SearchMe to work? I can log in and type in the search term, and the various related "categories" appear -- but that's all. I never get past that page and the "stack of images" doesn't load. I have reinstalled Adobe, and I have tried to sign in through both Firefox and Internet Explorer, to no avail. I've checked and rechecked everything I know of to do, but otherwise I'm not especially technological and am stuck. Can anyone tell me what else might be going wrong? Thanks!