Last week I received a beta invitation to searchme, a new visual search engine, and started playing around. I've seen a lot of search engine variations popping up in the last few years, and so I've been waiting a while to formulate my thoughts on this one.
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.