RutSum

Searchme Private Beta Reviewed

Searchme is a new kind of search engine, a search engine that lets you see your results before you actually visit them. It is currently in beta, and to test it you have to get invited. If you want to get invited, register your email with them on their official site.

I registered on their site for an invite quite some time ago, but got an invitation only yesterday. I was quite excited to be honest, after watching the following video on their website, which more or less sums up why you should consider Searchme as an alternative to your favorite search engine, and what new features it has to offer over the already existing big search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or Ask.

What I Think

Searchme definitely impresses you at the first look. The concept is new, and it’s exciting to be able to view screenshots of your results. This helps you a lot in saving time, you get a fair idea if you will find what you need on a particular webpage by looking at it’s screenshot.

One thing that is noticeable from this screenshot is that searchme has indexed RutSum on Blogger, while it’s been over 2 months since I shifted to Wordpress. This obviously means that they are very slow in updating their cache, and this is understandable as updating images of the whole web is a Herculean task. But if they don’t increase the indexing speed radically, it might prove fatal for them, leading to their downfall before their rise.

Another thing that is noticeable from this screenshot is that you can scroll through your results in an interface very similar to the iTunes album covers manager. The scrolling was smooth, and not jerky, when I tested it on Firefox 3 Beta 4 on PCLinuxOS.

Below each screenshot, is a small box that pops up when you hover your cursor over it, showing information about that site, where in the page’s content your keyword is included, and the URL of the webpage.

You have an option in ‘Settings’ using which you can filter out adult content, according to your preference.

Searchme also offers you with two themes - Night and Day. I personally like my search results on a white background, so I chose to use the ‘Day’ theme, which is a smooth white theme, with a blue-greyish gradient on the top and bottom.

Now for the feature that I liked the most - Smart Categories. Most of the times, when you are searching for something online, there is an element of ambiguity, due to sharing of a particular name by a variety of things.
For example, when I search for ‘panther’ on Google, I get a variety of search results, about the animal, the Apple operating system, a company by that name that sells media equipment, panther comic books. But usually, you are searching for only one of these. Searchme organizes your search into different categories, and when you select the category you want, you will see results related to only that aspect of the search keyword, and not the other ones.

If you still want to see the static text results with links, there is a button on the bottom of the page, which you can click to bring up old Google style search results.

Conclusion

Though Searchme looks promising with all its new features, I still think of it more as a play tool just for browsing, and not very efficient for day to day searching, especially for web enthusiasts like me, who swear by Google and spend around 1/25ths of their lifetime searching. You tend to play around with your search results, which obviously hampers productivity.

Moreover, a DSL or Cable connection is required for fast searching, while most people in India are still on either dial-up connections, or even 128, 256 or 512 Kbps broadband connections.
Maybe future development and new features could push it higher into the market, but it seems unlikely that it would be able to give a challenge to the already settled big players in the search engine market.

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