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]

Tags: searchme, visual-search, visual-search-engine