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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: Features, Beta, Search, web 2.0

Viewzi visual search engine gives you a dozen new ways to search


Text based search engines are all right if you're looking for text-based web pages. But Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google all have features that let you search for images or videos, because let's face it, that's what you're looking for on the internet much of the time. But the major search engine's approach toward image and video search feels a lot like the old fashioned approach to text-based search. You get a list of results, a brief description, and a link to the original source. If you're lucky, you may get the ability to watch a video or view a larger version of the thumbnail without leaving the search page, but that's about it.

Viewzi is one of a handful of new web sites that's aimed at making visual search a little more... visual. Like visual search engine SearchMe, Viewzi lets you scroll between screenshots of web pages. But it doesn't stop there. Viewzi offers over a dozen different ways to view search results. You can pick your favorite view and then conduct a search. Or you can rely on Viewzi to automatically detect the type of information you're probably looking for and select a view for you.

For example, if you're searching for a song title, Viewzi will move the MP3 search view to the top of the list so you can find and listen to songs. If you search for "weather in Philadelphia," Viewzi will recommend a weather view or a news view, which shows associated content like a weather forecast or news stories related to your search.

Viewzi launched a public beta today, which means the service, which we first mentioned last summer is now open to anyone. But it is still a beta, and some search views work better or load more quickly than others.

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]

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