Searchme project

Introduction to Searchme



Searchme Demo


Searchme is a new search engine that uses visual search and category refinement. We think it will help you find what you're looking for, faster, with a lot less spam. It's a new way to search that takes advantage of the size and bandwidth of today's Internet and the increasingly visual way that we all interact online.

The idea for Searchme came when Mark Kvamme, Searchme's chairman, got tired of looking through a bunch of unrelated results for articles on motocross. He suggested to founders Randy Adams and John Holland that they create a search engine that sorted results into categories. The Searchme visual interface came about when Randy, a father of seven, helped his four-year-old son search for children's web sites that he'd seen on TV. It struck Adams that if a search engine could show big pictures of the pages it found before users clicked through to a site, it'd be much easier to quickly find what they were looking for.

After more than three years of engineering, imaging billions of web pages, and fine-tuning our approach many times over, Searchme was born. We've built it from the ground up to optimize it for speed, but we still have a long way to go. We're just getting started on our first steps toward creating a smart new way to search today's Web.

How It Works

Searchme sorts your search results into relevant topics, then lets you scroll through and preview the web pages associated with your query, before you click through. As you start typing, category icons appear that relate to your search. For example, if you type "bonds", it suggests "savings" or "stocks" or "baseball". Choose a category, and you'll see pictures of the web pages that match your search. You can quickly review these pages to find the best one, then go right to that site.

Simply put, Searchme lets you see what you're searching for, before you click through.

Why It's Unique

Searchme's visual interface and category suggest features make us different from most other search engines. The visual interface delivers results as a browsable stack of "pages" - pictures of actual web pages that users can check out before visiting them. Category suggest, a seemingly simple feature, is based on a complicated analysis and categorization process that uses unique technology to divide results into predetermined, carefully-honed topics.

We're growing every day, and the quality of our results will vary as we make Searchme better and better. We'd love your help - if you have any suggestions, let us know!

Who Should Use It

Anyone can use Searchme - casual Internet users, professionals, college students. It especially appeals to visual people. Structured like a video game, Searchme's visual style and categories make it easy and fun to use, on a laptop or big screen.

Who's Involved

Searchme was founded in 2005 by Randy Adams, CEO, and John Holland, CMO, and received initial funding from Sequoia Capital. If you'd like to help us build Searchme, check out our jobs section.