Elliott Ng

Via Kara Swisher and TechCrunch I learned about the SearchMe private beta announce. I just signed up for it and look forward to seeing it. Kara broke the story but 5 days ago RichardbaxterSEO at YouMOZ noticed SearchMe crawler traffic and connected the dots that SearchMe earlier created the Wikiseek engine. Louis Grey also noted the crawler more than 30 days ago!

Caveat: I have not tried the product. But here’s my initial take:

1. SearchMe looks great for browsing and general navigational searches when you are just starting a search or research process.
2. For more targeted searches, I am not sure how SearchMe’s Visual Search–the iPod Touch like “cover flow”–can help me efficiently find what I’m looking for.
3. SearchMe should focus on discovery and browsing…sort of like StumbleUpon 2.0 powered by search.

1. SearchMe looks great for browsing and general navigational searches when you are just starting a search or research process.

One way they claim to help people is through CategorySuggest, the disambiguation of search results using categories. For example, if you type Labrador then they will show you visual icons for “pets” and “Canada” so you can better clarify your intent. This is great when you are typing in general terms and need the engine to help you express your intent more clearly.

But this is not unique. For example, Clusty.com (by Vivisimo ) has been doing automated clustering forever:

Ask (and Teoma before that) also does the same thing.

Yahoo! Search Assistant combines disambiguation with helping you refine your query:

Google does not separately do disambiguation but simply interweaves the results in their SERP page. But Google understands that Google doesn’t yet understand your intent. For example, they provide both the “Canada province” meaning and the “Dog” meaning in their first Wikipedia result:

2. For more targeted searches, I am not sure how SearchMe’s Visual Search–the iPod Touch like “cover flow”–can help me efficiently find what I’m looking for.

Caveat. I have not yet seen the product . But I simply do not believe that for more targeted searches, showing a thumbnail of the page is the best way for people to find what they are looking for.

The job of search engines is to understand intent, and to show the most relevant fragments of information from destination pages that help users select the best result for them. For example:

Live decided that for the query “digital cameras” the most important dimensions were photos, star rating, names of top products, and quick links to other guides and reviews.

I’m working at Kango.com, a new semantic search application focused on travel planning. We also have to decide what infomation to show to help people determine which website and product to research further:

Here we’ve decided that relevance to their search criteria (in this case “family friendly”), reviews and ratings, photo, price, and location (there is a map over to the right) are the factors that people want to know to decide if they want to do further research on a hotel. (Sorry about the debug “confidence interval” stuff on the right. That will be removed in the final product)

In these two examples, what if Live and Kango were constrained to only show the Visual Search “cover flow” experience that SearchMe is providing? To be fair, SearchMe provides a ListView feature that allows you to go back into a traditional search results page experience.

3. SearchMe should focus on discovery and browsing…sort of like StumbleUpon 2.0 powered by search.

In summary, SearchMe needs to decide what kinds of searches to focus on–general vs. specific, discovery/inspiration vs. specialized, and target verticals–where the Visual Search feature allows the user to get a rich, browse experience. In my opinion, SearchMe should become StumbleUpon 2.0, focused on discovery and browse. It should not compete with the host of vertical search engines (like ours at Kango) and even Google, Yahoo!, Live, and Ask, who are effectively blending the right page elements at the right time, to help people get more specific information.

Tags: SearchMe

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:04 am and is filed under Elliott Ng, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.