Searchme: Most Visual Search Engine Yet? - Just Like My iPod
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That’s what our CTO Rich Smith said when I showed him how Searchme’s interface works. If you’ve ever used Coverflow on your iPod to find a CD, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Rather than showing you links, Searchme shows you screen shots of the web pages themselves and lets you scroll through them so smoothly you’ll think you’re flipping pages in a book. I can’t really do it justice here, because the screen shots I take won’t be dynamic, but here’s an example of a search on – what else? – SEO:
I had to crop and shrink to get it to fit, but I think you can tell what’s happening here. See that slider at the very bottom? You use it to move pages back and forth across the screen. Your search term is highlighted in yellow on each web page screen shot, so you can tell the potential relevance of the page. And the results aren’t bad; the first page that came up was the Wikipedia page on SEO, which is about what I’d expect.
Right clicking on the screen shot of a web page in the stack takes you to the actual page. Left clicking on a page simply brings it to the center -- unless it’s already there, in which case it takes you to the actual web page.
That’s just a basic search. There’s a lot more to searching with Searchme. It uses AJAX and other web programming tricks to give you an experience that really doesn’t seem to need a help page – and that’s very high praise coming from me. I’ll show you what I mean in the next section.
Next: Searchme’s Helpful Tricks >>
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