SearchMe Leave Much To Be Desired

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, March 29, 2008

It seems there’s a new search engine in town. Quite frankly, they’ve got some work to do.

SearchMe is a visual search engine that let’s you scroll through screen shots of web pages based on your search query. Right now it’s in beta, which means it is totally incomplete. In fact, they’ve only got about a billion pages indexed right now. Google has that many pages indexed for some search queries. So you can see, they’ve got a long way to go.

The site is basically all Flash, which means it won’t rank in the other search engines and they’ll have to rely entirely on viral marketing and word of mouth not Search Engine Optimization. But due to its deficiencies, I don’t see too many people recommending it to their friends. For one thing, because it is done in Flash, load times are slower than for normal search engines. That’s a big point because if you are really looking for something then you want to find it fast.

Some other failing points are these:

1. With SearchMe, you don’t get the number of results returned for your query. I’d like to know that.
2. Also, the scrolling from page to page is a little sluggish (again, it’s Flash).
3. On the positive side, you can scroll through titles and descriptions just like with other search engines, but they don’t all appear on one page at a glance. You have to scroll, which is another awkward feature of Flash.
4. Each screen shot shows a good picture of the page result, but you don’t always know what page it is. You can’t see the URL. There is a little pop up at the bottom of each screen shot that shows you the title and description for that page, but the URL is so small you can’t really see it. It needs to be bigger.

Here are a few suggestions for making SearchMe a better search engine:

• Make the scrolling easier by allowing users to scroll through the pages by mouseover when they move over the pages left or right. The scroll bar at the bottom of the screen is too awkward.
• Put the URL of each page above the screen shot and make it bigger so that it is easier to see.
• Show me the number of results returned for my query.
• Let users know up front what the criteria for the search results are.
• Tell me what the “flag as inappropriate” button is supposed to be for - is to flag results not appropriate for my query or to flag results as inappropriate for viewing?

Even if these changes were incorporated, there’s no guarantee that SearchMe would survive. There is no reason other than pure curiosity for a searcher to use the search engine when the existing search engines do such a great job of returning results. Even with their faults, Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live, and Ask have much more to offer.

                      Category: Search Engines                      

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