You may recall the relatively new visual search engine called Searchme which allows you to see graphical snapshots of your search results before you click on a page. The theory here is you can get a better idea about a result if you can see what the page looks like first -- before you click on it. This is useful if a search result is a turn-off and you prefer a different result. Similar to the interface popularized by Apple, you drag a slider bar at the bottom of the screen to scroll through pages. You can also click a button to scroll individual pages.
While the concept is cool it is not resonating with enough people to make Searchme very popular. A look at the company's web traffic numbers show this to be the case. Quantcast ranks the site 1,376,595 out of all sites in the world. For a search engine this is atrocious. It needs to be in the top few thousand. Alexa ranks the site in the top 40,000 with positive upward momentum. It is tough to understand how these two different websites can rank Searchme so differently but instead of focusing on metrics, I want to point out the service has a new feature called stacks which allows you to combine a few websites, photos, videos, etc into categories which are then linkable in blogs, emailable, etc.
Within the Searchme search engine you can just drag and drop pages, graphics, etc onto the stack you create in the top right hand corner and from there you can reference the stack later and share it. This really socializes the web.
At first I thought you had to find what you are looking for within Searchme to add it to the stack. I thought this was a problem as I couldn't find past Searchme articles and blogs from TMCnet using Searchme -- I had to use Google. The good news is I found a way to add any URL manually. At the bottom of the Stacks box in the upper right-hand corner is an icon which says add URL. You click on this and are presented with a box allowing you to add a title, URL and description.
Here is an example of test stack which was created by dragging the first few results from a Searchme search on TMCnet. Here is a stack of some past TMCnet articles and blogs on Searchme.
Why is this feature important? Well -- there are often instances where you want to share multiple items in a single link. Two days ago in fact I wanted to list past blogs on the VPF and I resorted to doing this:
What I could do now is to add all five of these links onto a single stack and then link to the stack. There are probably other tools that do this as well but if there is one thing Searchme is good at it is sharing multiple pages/URLs. I am not convinced I want to search with it but as a graphical presentation tool it excels.
For Searchme, this new functionality could be the viral boost the company needs to keep it in front of bloggers and columnists who in turn will spread the Searchme search engine virally to their readers.
A smart move if you ask me.
While the concept is cool it is not resonating with enough people to make Searchme very popular. A look at the company's web traffic numbers show this to be the case. Quantcast ranks the site 1,376,595 out of all sites in the world. For a search engine this is atrocious. It needs to be in the top few thousand. Alexa ranks the site in the top 40,000 with positive upward momentum. It is tough to understand how these two different websites can rank Searchme so differently but instead of focusing on metrics, I want to point out the service has a new feature called stacks which allows you to combine a few websites, photos, videos, etc into categories which are then linkable in blogs, emailable, etc.
Within the Searchme search engine you can just drag and drop pages, graphics, etc onto the stack you create in the top right hand corner and from there you can reference the stack later and share it. This really socializes the web.
At first I thought you had to find what you are looking for within Searchme to add it to the stack. I thought this was a problem as I couldn't find past Searchme articles and blogs from TMCnet using Searchme -- I had to use Google. The good news is I found a way to add any URL manually. At the bottom of the Stacks box in the upper right-hand corner is an icon which says add URL. You click on this and are presented with a box allowing you to add a title, URL and description.
Here is an example of test stack which was created by dragging the first few results from a Searchme search on TMCnet. Here is a stack of some past TMCnet articles and blogs on Searchme.
Why is this feature important? Well -- there are often instances where you want to share multiple items in a single link. Two days ago in fact I wanted to list past blogs on the VPF and I resorted to doing this:
Shrihari Pandit got on stage this morning to kick off day 2 of VPF Summer 2008 (1,2,3,4,5) and discussed how the VPF is a distributed Ethernet network which has grown in 9 cities in the US and London.
What I could do now is to add all five of these links onto a single stack and then link to the stack. There are probably other tools that do this as well but if there is one thing Searchme is good at it is sharing multiple pages/URLs. I am not convinced I want to search with it but as a graphical presentation tool it excels.
For Searchme, this new functionality could be the viral boost the company needs to keep it in front of bloggers and columnists who in turn will spread the Searchme search engine virally to their readers.
A smart move if you ask me.
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