Searchme: Most Visual Search Engine Yet? - Searchme Gives You Options
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You saw in the previous section that Searchme gives you the option of using a list of links. The visual search engine also hasn’t forgotten about the long tail. You can search on a general term, as I did for SEO. But when you enter such a term into the search box, Searchme offers you a bunch of categories to help you focus your search. You have the option of clicking on one of those categories even after you’ve done your search to narrow things down.
The categories appear to the right of the search box in the form of icons with words. There are arrows on either side of the string of icons, so you can scroll through them. Here are the icons that appeared for my search:
You don’t see it here, because I had to scroll to it, but “online forums” was one of the categories Searchme offered. When I tried it, SEO Chat’s forums were in the fifth screen shot from the top. Not bad.
It’s pretty clear from most of what comes up, however, that they still need to do more indexing. I didn’t see Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch at the top of any of the results I checked for SEO. This is disappointing, but not a terrible shock; remember that Searchme is still in beta. Nevertheless, having the scrolling categories is a great touch.
Again, I have to say that the interface helps you out in intuitive ways. To the right of the categories is a large black button that says “search all” in white. You can click that button at any time to search all of the categories for your key word. When you do, the categories go dim. When you click the icon for a particular category, that icon gets brighter, while the other icons and the “search all” button go dim. It’s a great way to help you keep track of what you’re searching.
Oh by the way, these aren’t the only options Searchme gives you. To the right of the “search all” button is a link that says “settings.” Clicking on that link scrolls down a menu that lets you choose whether to filter out adult content (it’s filtered by default), set the theme to day or night (it’s set to night by default), or open links in the current window or a new window (default is current window). Here’s a screen shot of the day theme, in case you were wondering what that looks like:
It’s clear that a lot of thought went into Searchme’s interface, and that the company is dedicated to improving it. I found very few nits to pick. I’d like to see an option for opening links in a new tab; I understand that this might be a problem to add, since it’s not compatible with most of the older search engines. I’d like to see some way to get a longer list of links, maybe with a split screen. But this didn’t bother me nearly as much as it did when I reviewed Quintura, so Searchme is probably doing something right here.
Overall I’m very happy with the interface. I could even see myself using it for searches involving my hobbies. I’m a crafter, so if I’m interested in making something, it’s a big help to see a picture of the object in question before following the link.
It’s the search engine’s results that concern me the most. Relevance should come with time as they index more pages and improve their algorithm. The ability to flag a result as inappropriate should help them catch spam, as long as users don’t abuse it.
Searchme is quite aware of spam as a big potential issue right now, as you can tell from reading Searchme’s blog. They also communicate on Twitter, by the way, so if you want to follow Searchme’s exploits or what is on the minds of some of their employees, you can. As near as I can tell, this is a company that is well worth watching, and I wish them luck.
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