th u v much

@Red – my article is not bad for the reasons you imply, Red. Just because you don’t like Searchme you shouldn’t assume that any article that doesn’t paint Bing in golden colors is bad. FYI, I read the press and the percentage of bad Bing reviews is very low. I don’t understand what gave you the impression in my article that I am a Microsoft hater. The title? Well, then that was a good title: it made you read some of the article and express an opinion. About the obscene image: it is there so that no one from searchme could come back and say “we do not have pornography issues, you are wrong.” This can help them fix the issue and it also shows the readers one of Searchme’s worst problems. FYI, Bing had a similar issue shortly after launch too, but they fixed it.

@Darren884 – catchy headline indeed. :) As for “biased opinion” – nothing in my article is biased. It’s a search engine review, no more, no less. The only reason I compared it with Bing in the title is because, like many others, I expected Bing to be a bit more than a pretty face.

@Robin – I am glad you liked the article. I guess you are one of the very few. :)

@Dr John – you are right, it is rather slow to use, and the search results are obviously lacking the quality offered by the major players. But the search results quality issue is faced by all small search engines trying to compete with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and etc. As you note, my focus was on the features that are not offered by the big players: the splendid visual interface, the social/ share function and the stacks. These are features not so difficult to implement and in my opinion, the modern search engine should be able to offer them. I was expecting Bing to do it, that’s all.

I tried the spacetime search mentioned elsewhere, and the entire PC ground to a halt as it composed the images for the results.

There is another engine which adds a small thumnail next to the standard list of returns which is much faster to use (but it’s name escapes me, and I’m using a borrowed PC so it isn’t bookmerked, sorry. Any know it?)

Also I loved your reasoning on the name. That made me laugh right out loud. Instead of saying “Try Googling it” We would have to say, “Try Searchmeing it” OR “Try Searchming it.” LOLOL!!! Someone slipped up there. Big time. I love that you have a sense of humor as well the solid knowledge. Thank you so much!!!

No it doesn’t. I hate this ‘Lets all get on the Microsoft hating’ bandwagon. Everytime micrsoft comes with something new for their search engine, all the so-called experts write negative things about it probably without even actually trying it. Bing has gotten a 2% increase in share in the last week according to Comscore. Lets hope it continues, as I am sure most people would want a landscape with several big search engines as opposed to one company completely dominating the scene.

Also, this is a family-friendly site, wo why is there are an obscene image captured?

Thank you for writing the article.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. For me, the most “visually appealing” form for search results is plain old words!!!

That’s why I still use Google. That said, if they try to go anymore “web 2.0″ (like the mess that Bing is) then I shall despair!!

There’s two schools of thought here…design amd function. You (and most others around here it would seem) are with the former, I’m with the latter!

Seriously. I made a search for a term that my customers would search on. The result was meaningless, some kind of image with sponsored ads under it. Completely useless. The homepage itself was heavy with ads (none on Google). Cheap, tacky flashing ads, at that. It was also very slow to load.

I can’t think why anyone would use it. That said, complete uselessness didn’t stop Twitter from becoming popular!

Best wishes.

i’m building a new search site too.. http://www.vizoor.com

what do you think of the brand?, layout?, etc..

your feedback is welcome..

Searchme does provide an elegant visual alternative to text-based searches, and Mihaela does an excellent job of describing that here.

Bing seems to work fine, but it didn’t excite me. I didn’t really see anything new there.

It’s probably too early to tell if either of these search engines (or any other search engine) will be able to topple Google as the leader.

Though I wonder how scaleable that will be long term. Seems like it would take a ton of server resources to generate all those screen shots in real time like that, especially if search volume goes up dramatically.

Searchme: A New Visual Search Engine
kara.allthingsd.com/20080311/searchme-a-new-visual-search-engine/
NOTE: allthingsd.com is the tech site for the Wall Street Journal.

New search engines aspire to supplement Google
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/12/future.search.engine/index.html?iref=newssearch

The CNN article also mentions Kosmix, which gives you an entire page of text, images and videos on one topic. Kosmix is worth checking out. Duckduckgo looks like just another search engine to me. WolframAlpha is brilliant but is for geeks only.

Personally, I love the approach of Searchme. I mentioned it here on Sitepoint in posts on “Microsoft’s New Search Engine: Bing” (May 30 and June 4 2009) because I have doubts that the plain text search results of Google will be enough for websurfers in the future. Searchme looks more like the future of search. The allthingsd.com article mentions that Google has a project similar to Searchme in the works.