I finally got a password for the SearchMe beta and had a chance to play with this relatively new search engine. Simply stated, this search service is what Apple might design. You put in your search term and when the system returns results it defaults to a graphical mode where pages are displayed in a stacked format.

You are able to scroll through pages as you might scroll through photos on an iPhone in fact.

So people who are comfortable with this sort of UI should be happy with SearchMe. Still, I can’t help but think that graphical search is actually less efficient. Although I am able to see a number of web pages at once, I can’t actually read them, to see what might be important to me.

A user can see things like site logos/names pretty quickly but this information is not so critical and can be discerned in text format as well.

I am pretty impressed however with what SearchMe has done as this is a great search engine for people who may be looking for a familiar page or trying to find a graphical web page where viewing scaled down images is still helpful.

So I suppose SearchMe is great for more graphical search while text-heavy searching is still better done the old-fashioned way.

I do applaud the company for putting a new spin on search… This graphical approach does hold promise and I cant wait to see how the service advances.