Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

searchme posts

Filed under: Internet, Video, Web services, Search, web 2.0

SearchMe visual search engine adds media search, bookmarks

SearchMe Media
Visual search engine SearchMe is out of private beta and now has two nifty new features: Media search and stacks. Stacks is a fancy way of saying bookmarks, while Media Search lets you interact with online videos and images all from the SearchMe interface.

While traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo! present you with a list of text-based results, SearchMe shows screenshots of web pages matching your query. For example, searching for "Download Squad" would bring up a screenshort of our home page. When you click on the image you can visit the original page.

Now you can also click the video or images tabs and pull up screenshots of YouTube videos or Flickr images. When you click the play button you can even watch a video without leaving the SearchMe page. So you can flip through videos much like you would using the PicLens browser plugin, but without installing anyting.

The Stacks feature lets you organize collections of bookmarked pages. For example, you could create a list of your favorite tech news sites with thumbnails for easy reference. You can also share your stacks via email or social networking sites.

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Search, web 2.0

SearchMe visual search engine launches private beta


When you go to a search engine and enter a search term, you're never quite sure what you're going to get. Google, Yahoo! and all the other major search engines will spit out a list of links with brief snippets of text that should give you a rough idea of what's on each web page. But until you click through, it's hard to tell if you'll find what you're looking for.

One way to fix this problem (if it is a problem, honestly it usually takes just a few seconds to find what you're looking for on Google), is to provide users with screenshots of a web page before they click through to visit that page. SearchMe is a new service that does exactly that.

When you enter a search term, SearchMe will scour its index for matching web pages. But instead of presenting you with a list of text links, you get a screen filled with web page screenshots. You can scroll through them in Cover Flow fashion to find the page you're looking for. If you like text based lists, you can use the list mode which will bring up a resizable list box at the bottom of the while keeping the thumbnails in the top.

SearchMe is hardly the first company to launch a visual web browser. Exalead launched a service last year that presents thumbnail images of web sites next to text-based links. And you can install a Firefox plugin that adds the same functionality to Google. But neither solution is quite as slick or pretty to look at as SearchMe.

SearchMe is currently in private beta, but you can request an invite from the site's home page.

[via BoomTown]

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio