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Posts Tagged ‘visual search engine’

Visual Search Engine SearchMe: A Pie In The Sky?

June 25th, 2009 by Erin Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Innovation is good, especially in this search-crazed Web 2.0 world.

But like a lot of innovative projects, start-ups have their moment in the sun and then they slowly start to fade away.

Such is the case with SearchMe – the visual search engine.

I emphasis the word visual because it does exactly what Google and Bing don’t. It presents search results as a stack of full page previews that you can flip through.

Fun, yes.

Easy on the eyes, no.

While you may get a kick out seeing a page before you click on it, imagine seeing dozens of them at once. Does someone really want to sit there and digest all of that?

Text search results put forth by Google and the rest of the mainstream search engines are quicker to sort through – and take a lot less brain power to consume.

I’m not the only person who feels this way either.

SearchMe’s ad platform- which is really pretty interesting-  is in a slump and the reason is traffic, or lack thereof.

In February, SearchMe had about 3 million monthly visitors in the U.S. In April, the site had grown to 4 million monthly visitors. But in May, the number of U.S. visitors plummeted to around 750,000.

SearchMe says that this drop in numbers is due to the fact that the search engine was spending $500,000 a month in advertising and driving a lot of traffic to the site. The startup is now spending little to no capital on advertising and is in the process of closing distribution deals to place the search bar in browsers and toolbars.

SearchMe maintains that advertisers love the search engine and its unique features. Yet, without visitors there’s no money to be made.

The thing is… SearchMe is in a world all of its own. It really isn’t competing with Google and Bing – because it can’t.

But if you can’t compete, then why bother?

I’m all for blazing a trail, but unfortunately SearchMe is anything but on fire.

 Tags: google and bing, search me, visual search engine